Long Division of Body and Soul IV: Robin

Robin is rich and she is kind to me. We are kind to each other. She’s my first real friend in Marin county. She goes to Russia, for the opera. To Italy, for the opera. To Santa Fe, for the opera. To France for the food. Owns a boat and expensive cars. Owns a view of San Francisco Bay as fine as Arthur’s. Is divorced. Is athletic. Is lonely, and dissatisfied with it. Is not naturally beautiful, but is working on it. Believes in perfectibility. Now, when I’m too ill to go out, she delivers chicken soup to me in a Porsche.

We have a limited conspiracy of the damaged: my health, her wealth.

I first meet Robin in a cafe on the day she is going into hospital for investigatory surgery. She’s nervous, and because nervous, talkative. It turns out that the only people she can ask to go with her to the hospital, and drive her home while she is groggy, are people she pays, which is causing her some distress. I know about lonely hospital visits and offer to keep her company.

She weighs me up carefully, as if I might already have researched her bank accounts and engineered this meeting. But she believes in artists, that they are profoundly different and illogical, and so while her surgical investigation is underway, I read student manuscripts with my feet up in a waiting room, surrounded by people whose loved ones may be dying. It turns out that Robin does not have cancer.

She finds it hard to spend her money. Sometimes even the best is not sufficiently expensive. She goes to classes to learn how to give away money without being harassed by the recipients. She wants to buy friends, but does not want a friend who can be bought. She wants to be wanted. She thinks there is something hidden in art that she might need. Meaning, perhaps.

She is the person furthest away from the villagers I once worked with in Africa. I like her, but can’t love her. She is energetic, kind and laughs readily. Unlike the villagers, what to do with her life is a problematic issue. Unexpectedly, the richest person I’ve met here is also the nicest.

If you are wealthy and single, this is who you pay in Marin (incomplete list):

Undocumented Mexicans for the outdoor work
A pool guy, who visits
A personal trainer - you don’t have to be alone at the gym
A personal shopper - to find the right style
A fashion consultant - for taste
A massage therapist - to relax
A speech coach - for your public self
A cosmetic surgeon - for your public self
Hair stylist, manicurist, pedicurist, beautician, etc.
A house cleaner - Nigerian (part-time catalogue model)
A restaurant guy to plan your meals and have them delivered
An interior decorator - to arrange your house
A feng shui expert - to rearrange it
Art consultant, antiques consultant
Travel consultant
A dog trainer
A dog walker
A dog sitter
A dog
Two financial advisors - because you can’t trust just one
A personal lawyer - kept very busy
Ski instructor, music teacher, language teacher etc.
Car guy
A psychotherapist - because you need a friend
A relationship counsellor - in case you have one
Doctors, dentists, alternative health practitioners
A security consultant - to keep it all inside
Closet organiser - to keep it all straight
A Korean launderer
Introducers - so you can meet useful people
Sex partners - saves time and trouble
A personal manager to manage all these, except possibly the last.

It’s a lot to worry about.

It is the long division of body and soul
Life sliced thinner
The invisible hand making progress
Cutting deals
The general is made specific
The personal made commodity
The unsellable sold
The unpriced priced
Each transaction brought to market, taxed and added to the GNP
To count as progress

I think of this lying in bed in my sleeping loft, waiting for the sound of Robin’s Porsche. There are more days now when I can barely get up. I think of her sadness and how she can’t find a road in life that will lead her to be fully human. I realise for the first time that my family had been virtuoso generalists, when I just thought of us as engaged in the obvious and necessary.

We cut our own nails - on Mondays for luck.
Dad soled and heeled our shoes
And taught me how
He painted the house inside and out, hung the wallpaper
And taught me how.
He maintained and mended our bicycles
We chose our own house decorations,
Which was unfortunate in the case of the bamboo and rosebud wallpaper
Mum knitted new clothes, darned old ones
Made handkerchiefs out of old bed sheets
We grew our vegetables on an allotment and fruits in the back garden
Mum bottled the fruit, made jams and marmalade
And laid down Christmas puddings years in advance
She did laundry in a tub and hung it out to dry on Mondays
Like all the other women
For pedicure Dad scraped off the hard skin with an old potato peeler
After his weekly bath, after walking a hundred miles on factory floors
We shared the shopping, the cleaning, the bad cooking
We never hired a plumber, electrician or carpenter, never hired anyone
Dad did it
Grew grass and flowers where there were no fruits and vegetables
Never paid to exercise
You must be joking
I massaged my mother’s ankles when they swelled from queuing
Lit coal fires in our grate for heating
And the boiler once a week for baths
Read books from the free public library
Went to the free doctors and dentists
Lawyers were for wills
For therapy, we complained to people in the street
Or stayed unhappy
Stayed ugly and awkward, if we were
Threw away nothing
Our garden shed was built from scrap
They worked for wages too
Both of them
They shot low for happiness.

The market barely laid a hand on us
We were half way from peasants and half way to Sausalito
All this is still in me
Which is perhaps why I cannot love Robin
Here she comes
Cheerful
With a Tupperware container of soup big enough for a week