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It pleased my mother to call Aimee’s way of doing things “na?ve.” But Aimee felt she had already tried my mother’s route, the political route. She’d gone to bat for presidential candidates, back in the eighties and nineties, hosting dinners, making campaign contributions, haranguing audiences from the stages of stadiums. By the time I came into the picture she was finished with all that, just as the generation she’d once encouraged to the ballot box, my generation, were finished. Now she was committed to “making change happen on the ground,” she wanted only to “work with communities at a community level,” and I honestly respected her commitment, and only occasionally—when some of her fellow good people of means came up to the Hudson Valley house, to lunch or to swim, and to discuss this or that venture—would it become very hard to avoid seeing the things my mother saw. At those times I really felt my mother at my shoulder, an invisible conscience, or an ironic commentary, pouring poison in my ear from thousands of miles away, as I tried to listen to all these various good people of means—famous for playing the guitar or singing or designing clothes or pretending to be other people—chatter over cocktails about their plans to end malaria in Senegal or bring clean wells to Sudan and so on. But I knew Aimee herself had no abstract interest in power. She was motivated by something else: impatience. To Aimee poverty was one of the world’s sloppy errors, one among many, which might be easily corrected if only people would bring to the problem the focus she brought to everything. She hated meetings and long discussions, disliked considering an issue from too many angles. Nothing bored her more than “on the one hand this” and “on the other hand that.” She put her faith instead in the power of her own decisions, and these she made with her “heart.” Often these decisions were sudden, and were never changed or rescinded once she’d made them, for she believed in her own good timing, in timing itself, as a mystical force, a form of fate, operating at the global and cosmic level as much as at the personal. In fact, in Aimee’s mind these three levels were connected. It was the good timing of fate, as she saw it, that burned down the British headquarters of YTV, on 20 June 1998, six days after she visited us, the wiring going wrong somehow, in the middle of the night, sending a fire ripping through the place, destroying those miles and miles of VHS which had been, up till then, preserved from the corrupting influence of the London Underground. We were told it would be nine months before the offices were habitable again. In the meantime everybody was moved to an ugly, featureless office block in King’s Cross. My commute was twenty minutes longer, I missed the canal, the market, Snowdon’s birds. But I spent only six days in King’s Cross. It was all over for me the moment Zoe brought a fax to my desk, addressed to me, with a phone number on it, which I was to ring, with no explanation. From the other end came the voice of Aimee’s manager, Judy Ryan. She told me Aimee herself had requested that the brown girl in green come to her offices in Chelsea and be interviewed for a possible position. I was stunned. I paced outside that building for half an hour before I entered it, shaking, all the way up in the lift and through the hall, but when I walked into that room I saw the decision already made, right there on her face. There was no anxiety for Aimee, and no doubt: none of this, in her view, was coincidence or luck or even happy accident. It was “Fate.” “The Great Fire”—as the employees christened it—was only part of a conscious effort, on behalf of the universe, to bring the two of us together, Aimee and me, a universe which at the same moment declined to intervene in so many other matters.
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