A Beggar's Kingdom Read online

  “Being a fraud more like,” Ashton said. “There’s something he wants from you. It’s so obvious. How can you not see it? I don’t know why you bought into his lies. Has he hypnotized you? What’s in that gross water he keeps plying you with?”

  “Tiger.”

  “Right, okay. What I’m saying is he totally wants you to do again whatever it is you do for him.”

  “I don’t do it for him.”

  Ashton harrumphed.

  “And you’re wrong,” Julian said. “Last time he tried to talk me out of it.” Tried to talk me out of it by fearmongering, Julian thought, not meeting Ashton’s eye.

  “Not this time.”

  “He doesn’t care, honest. He doesn’t have a dog in this fight.”

  “Oh, not a dog, that swindler,” Ashton said. “Maybe a tiger.”

  “How can he be a swindler, Ash? I fall into a starry profusion, through a sharp-fanged warp, and crawl out somewhere else in time and space, and find Josephine again. I told you about the Great Fire, about the Globe Theatre, the leper colony in the marshes near Drury Lane.”

  “He’s drugged you. You’re having visions.”

  “If I was going to have visions, why would I have them of her working in a brothel and murdering one of her customers? And did Devi break my feet and scorch my lungs, too?”

  “He’s a dangerous and powerful man,” Ashton said. “He’s like an assassin bug—tiny but lethal.”

  “Assassin bug?”

  “One of the scariest insects known to mankind.”

  Julian groaned. “Tell you what,” he said, “next time we go to Quatrang, I’ll tell him in front of you that I’m not going back, so you can see he wants nothing from me. Will that make you feel better?”

  “Why would there be a next time?” said Ashton.

  “There isn’t going to be.”

  “I mean, next time for Quatrang, fool.”

  “Oh.”

  As they got off at Bank, Ashton asked Julian if Devi was right. Was his skepticism a burden?

  Julian admitted it was. “But it’s fine, Ash, it’s no longer an issue. It’s in the past. And the past is done.”

  They strode quickly down the long length of the Bank of England’s windowless marble wall, and as they turned the corner on Lothbury, Ashton said, “Then why do I keep feeling as Faulkner did, that if the past was truly done, there would be less grief and sorrow? Seems to me that not only is the past not done, it’s not even the fucking past.”

  Faulkner was right. There was no was. There was only is.

  But Julian was done. To prove to his friend there was nothing to worry about, the next time they had lunch at Devi’s, Julian announced he wasn’t going back.

  “That’s fine,” Devi said.

  “I mean it.”

  “I hope so. As you know, I think that’s best—for many reasons.”

  Julian gave Devi a shut-the-hell-up glare and Ashton an I-told-you-so one. Both men rolled their eyes.

  “Sometimes, Ashton, I argue with your friend,” Devi said, “because in arguing back, Julian defines for himself what he is. When I agree with him too much, it unsettles him, makes him cantankerous. Like now.”

  “That’s not true!” That was Julian.

  Ashton said nothing.

  “All things being equal, Julian will always choose a fight,” Devi said. “He prefers it to almost anything—inside and outside the ring. He needs combat to survive. The easy life suffocates him. The easy answer is the last thing he wants. Contact and combat is your friend’s motto.”

  Ashton said nothing, looking upset that Devi figured out in five minutes what had taken him much longer.

  “How is your father, Ashton?” Devi said. “Have you seen him this week? What did you two talk about?”

  “I can’t stand that man,” Ashton said to Julian after they left.

  Julian smirked. “What’s with you two? He’s not crazy about you either. The other week he called you a born wanderer.”

  “That’s what I’m talking about, his insufferability,” Ashton said, full of pique. “I’m not the born wanderer. That’s how you know the guy’s a fraud. He can’t even see what’s in front of him. You’re the born wanderer.”

  Julian continued to see Devi but on his own. Devi cooked for Julian. Often they had cha ca, sizzling chunks of fried fish with garlic, ginger, turmeric and dill. Julian could’ve eaten it every day for a year, it was that good. When he told the cook what Ashton had said, Devi smiled condescendingly. “Ask your friend if he knows the meaning of the word wander. You’re only a wanderer if you travel alone. When there are two of you, it’s not called wandering. It’s called an adventure. And you and your girl are on an extraordinary adventure.”

  “Were on an adventure.”

  “That’s what I meant.”

  “And Ashton is not alone. He’s with Riley.”

  “Tell me more about this Riley,” Devi said. “Is she living here in London with him?”

  Damn that Devi! “Even so, he’s still not alone. I’m here with him.”

  “Are you, Julian?”

  It was really time to go.

  “When is he moving back to L.A.?” Devi asked. “I don’t see the harp or the lamb with him. I see the smoke of torment. I see woe in the street.”

  “Can you stop it? I don’t know what you’re talking about. What do you see?”

  “Not much. I told you, I feel things. Things that aren’t good.”

  “How many more things that aren’t good can happen to me, Devi?”

  “Not to you,” Devi said. “To him.”

  Grimly Julian stared at the shaman. Julian hated to be reminded of their conversation the previous year. What are you prepared to give up, Julian, to live as you want? Julian hated to have been proven wrong, hated to have failed. His blood was boiling. “Well, I’m never going back again,” he said, grabbing his coat. “So we’re good.”

  After that day, he stopped visiting Devi.

  ∞

  Almost all Julian did until the end of the year was work and box and swim.

  Except for the weekends when Ashton was away either back in L.A. or somewhere unspecified, or when Julian was at the pool or the gym, the two men hardly left each other’s side. They shopped together, went to work together, drank together, sparred together, played video games together. On rainy Notting Hill weekend afternoons, they scoped the streets, checking out garage sales, open markets, art galleries, pretty girls. They rode bikes through Hyde Park and Kensington Gardens, they hiked through Holland Park, they had long liquid brunches at quaint London pubs—like the Silver Cross—and got dressed up in fitted bespoke suits to go out on Saturday nights, when the class of women they chatted up increased geometrically with the price of their silk ties from Jermyn Street. Ashton tried, you had to give him that. No matter what Devi said, Ashton did his best.

  Julian, too.

  “Let me ask you a question, Jules,” Ashton said one night, late on the Central Line, as they were heading home thoroughly inebriated after last rounds at the Counting House.

  “You’re in no state to question me, especially in that tone of voice,” Julian said, “and I’m certainly in no state to answer you.”

  “In other words, the perfect time to have a serious conversation—when we’re both three sheets to the wind. Let me ask you: when you meet this girl, does she know who you are?”

  “Why would she? How could she?”

  “Uh-huh. But at the very least her name is Josephine, right?”

  “No—because it wasn’t her name,” Julian said. “Her name was Mia.”

  “Wait, so, a derivative of the most common name in the English language?”

  “She falls in love with me!”

  “Don’t shout, we’re on the tube,” Ashton said. “People will think we’re drunk.”

  “We are drunk.”

  After they got off at Notting Hill Gate and were staggering home, Ashton resumed. “Jules, have you considered t
he possibility that it’s just a random girl?”

  “You think I’m on the receiving end of some cosmic prank? Go to hell.”

  “Oh, sure, I mean, what are the chances of finding a nipply, lusty, brown-haired, brown-eyed chick named Mary who falls for you?”

  “I’m done listening to you.”

  But Ashton was on a roll. “You think you’re falling in love with Josephine, but it’s just some murdering broad named Mallory.”

  “Am I listening?”

  “You hook up with her in a brothel of all places—where naturally all true love begins—and she goes all doe-eyed on you, tells you you’re her one and only john, starts killing and stealing, and your first thought is—Josephine!”

  “I’m not only not listening, I’m no longer your friend.” Julian tried to speed up, but drunk Ashton was a faster and more coherent man than drunk Julian.

  “Are you pissed off because you know I’m right?”

  “Why are you still speaking?” Julian said. “You think I travel through time so I can hook up with a stranger? What about her feelings for me?”

  Ashton’s smile was from one side of the street to the other. “Jules, that’s my other point. Can we get real for a sec?”

  “No.”

  “We roomed together and lived together, lest you forgot.”

  “I wish I forgot.”

  “In our sophomore year, your bed was separated from mine by a thin sheet we hung up for fake privacy. Do you remember? Did you think this sheet was soundproof?”

  “Go to hell.”

  “I know all about you. Plus Gwen used to brag to Riley, who would then scold me—oh, and thanks for that, too, by the way. Julian does this, and Julian does that. Fuck you, buddy.” A grinning Ashton hooked his long arm around Julian’s neck as they zigzagged down the sidewalk. Julian tried to get away, but Ashton wouldn’t let him.

  “Your point?”

  “My point is,” Ashton said, “that any girl would be happy to biblically acquaint herself with you.”

  “Get off me.”

  “During foreplay you could ask her if she’s the one, and I promise you, promise you, by the time you get to the afterglow, she’ll be chirping yes! Yes, I’m the one, Jules! Wait, no, it’s me, I’m the one!”

  Julian pushed Ashton off him. “You’re ridiculous.”

  “But am I wrong?”

  “Both ridiculous and wrong.”

  “Here’s my final point,” Ashton said, grabbing Julian again. “Why do you have to spelunk, box, swim, bust up your body? Why can’t you find them and seduce them right here in London, in the comfort of your own home, in your tiny, woefully inadequate bed?”

  “I’m moving out.”

  “I promise to set you up only with brown-eyed girls named Maria. I know about a dozen off the top of my head.”

  “I’m packing my shit as soon as we get home.”

  “I’m not saying love again. I’m saying…”

  “Shut up.”

  Ashton was laughing, his arm around Julian’s neck. “You’ve tried it your way, Jules. You’ve tried it your way twice. Come on, buddy. Now let’s try it Ashton’s way.”

  And Julian said okay. “I’ll try it Ashton’s way, said the barmaid to the bishop.”

  ∞

  Julian didn’t know how his friend accomplished these things, but Ashton did set him up with an attractive brown-haired woman named Mary. They went out for a bite and a drink at her local pub and ended up at her place near the Imperial War Museum in Lambeth. When they were still at the pub, he told her he wasn’t looking for anything serious, and the woman said thank God because she wasn’t either.

  Julian left in the middle of the night. There was no tube and he couldn’t find a cab, so he had to hoof home five miles across Lambeth Bridge and around Hyde Park. The next morning when Ashton asked him how it went, Julian said, “What can I tell you, everything is worse south of the river.” They both chuckled. “But on the bright side, the Imperial War Museum is near her. Let’s go grab a bite and check it out.”

  “No, thank you. I don’t do anything south of the river, especially having to do with the war.”

  And so it went.

  Julian sparred with four different partners on four different days. He hit the speedbag five times a week with a thousand blurs of his gloved fists. He pummeled the heavy bag three times a week with five hundred blows of thunder. The bag would fall before Julian fell, and the blows reverberated through the gym, the glass in the grubby windows rattling with Julian’s immense anger. He pounded the bag to cleanse his body of rage, he swam miles in the local gym pool to exhaust himself, and when that still didn’t work, he slept with the women he chatted up in pubs and clubs and Franz Ferdinand concerts. They weren’t all named Mary. And Ashton’s theory proved not entirely correct. Not one of them, no matter how brown-haired and brown-eyed and Mary-monikered, no matter how long-limbed and white skinned, felt remotely like the Mary of Clerkenwell or the Mallory of the Silver Cross. Or the Josephine of L.A. Not one quantum particle of them felt like the girl he was eternally entangled with.

  But Ashton was right: Julian had to move on. He had to try to find a way to live again. At the very least he had to have sex again.

  And at the very least, that’s what he did.

  On Sunday mornings, Ashton would crawl out of his room to find Julian making coffee or eating leftovers, and there would be another irate woman yelling, Callie from Portobello, Candy from King’s Road, a girl from the Botanist and from the Colbert. “Howling in the night, yelling in the mornings, destroying speedbags,” Ashton said. “All you do is fuck and fight. Both with the same temper.”

  “I’m doing what you told me to, remember? You’re never happy.”

  “When will it end? I’m going crazy from the racket, both in the middle of the night and in the mornings. I’m going to charge the noise-cancelling headphones you forced me to buy against my share of the rent. Can’t you stay at their place? Are you doing this deliberately? Are you making our apartment uninhabitable so I start praying you’ll go do the time warp again?” Ashton grinned at his own cleverness.

  “Ash, I know it’s difficult for you to believe,” said Julian, “but when I’m with a girl, I hardly think of you at all. One might say never.”

  “Yeah, yeah.”

  Women left Julian nasty messages or waited by his front door to shout obscenities to his face. You never called me, you piece of shit. You said you would and you never did, and then I saw you in the pub with someone else. I know you said we weren’t serious, but you could’ve called me. Julian was left neutral by it. Other women couldn’t move the needle, they broke their mouths on his bitter stone, shattering as they came, while he kept waiting for the end-bell to ring. It never did. Rage was blacker than blindness, blacker than grief.

  Julian, go and come back for me. Clutching the Bill of Mortality in one hand, the gold coin in the other, he kept hearing Mallory’s dying voice in his head—when he wasn’t dreaming of Josephine, walking toward his café table.

  Julian, come back for me.

  Why, when the new moon was invisible in the sky, did he dream of her smiling? Earth, moon, and sun all in a line, a meridian line, a wishing moon, Josephine smiling, Mallory pleading…

  Come back for me.

  And in Notting Hill, the cast-off girls had fun, then wanted more, got insulted, bellowed at him, all hawks in motion. He told them he wasn’t looking for anything. And they assured him neither were they. Yet there was so much yelling. I’m serious, he would say. Please listen to me. But they had three pints, two cocktails, half a bottle of wine, and they couldn’t listen. And when he told one sober woman right at the outset, even before they had ordered the wine, that he wasn’t looking for anything long-term, she slapped him across the face and said, don’t get ahead of yourself, buddy, who even says you’ll get anywhere with me. He got somewhere with her, and now she, too, was shouting at him.

  “Jules, what a mess you’re making of
things,” Ashton said. “I think you’ve forgotten how to date women.”

  “You call what I’m doing dating?”

  “That’s true, this isn’t quite what I had in mind when I advised you to plug back into your life. You’ve gone from a monk to a player overnight. But sooner or later, all this whatever you want to call it is going to turn into a bloodbath. You’ll be sorry when one of them bashes your brains in with a cricket bat.”

  “How do you know that’s not what I’m hoping for?” said Julian.

  12

  A Subject of Choice

  AFTER CHRISTMAS, ASHTON ASKED JULIAN TO SIGN OFF ON THE sale of the Treasure Box. Nextel was becoming too big a responsibility. There was a lot to do in London, both in work and in life. And the prop business was dying without Ashton, who sounded philosophical when he spoke about it. It couldn’t continue. Back in L.A. over the holidays, he and Julian held an auction for the remainder of the props, gave away some posters and trinkets to friends, kept a few items Ashton valued, like his Bob Marley poster, and didn’t renew their lease on the building. “It’ll be a taco place now. They might call it Treasure Taco.” Ashton grinned.

  “Are you sure that instead of selling Treasure Box, you don’t want to move back to L.A.?” Julian said.

  “What do I have to move back for now?”

  “How about for me?” Riley said two months later. It was March. She was visiting the boys for a long weekend to celebrate Julian’s 36th birthday.

  “But, cupcake, you’re here in London with me,” Ashton said. “If I go back, I’ll be in L.A. without you. Come here, delicious. Give me a big smooch.”

  “You’re impossible.”

  “Is that why you love me?”

  “I love you in spite of it.” Leaving Ashton’s side, Riley draped her arm around Julian. “What about you, Jules? Ashton told me you’re finally dating…”

  Julian and Ashton exchanged a glance.

  “…And I’m so happy about that, but when are you going to find a girl and settle down?”

  “I found a girl already.”

  “I meant…another girl.” Riley rolled her eyes at Ashton as if to say, can you believe this guy?