Worn Out Wife Seeks New Life

by Carmen Reid

  Who do we still want revenge on, she asked herself? Who will we feel it’s okay to have levelled by the end of the play? Who is it okay to hate, today, right here, right now?

  Tupac’s next song was playing and out came his angry words about: ‘this white man’s world.’

  The Shylock character can’t be Jewish, or black or any other ethnic minority, Shylock has to be a rich, old, wasp white guy, it occurred to her. And he can try to explain himself to us, and we can feel nothing but sympathy for his lovely daughter, but when we take away his wealth at the end, it feels right. It’s a satisfying ending. So that means everyone else in the film is not rich-white-old; they’re young/poor/ black/ Latino/ disabled/ ethnic minority/ other… and that’s how we make The Merchant of Venice work and be relevant and be something the kids can get right behind today.

  Yes! Yes! Yeeeeees! River honked the horn several times with delight, startling a small group of cows. She couldn’t wait to be in the pub with her chilled drink tackling this new angle on the rewrite. This would work. This was the key. This was finally how she would make this script sing!

  And her first thought was not telling Philip and explaining how this was finally the breakthrough she’d been waiting for… her first thought was telling Dave, which she had to admit was a little weird. But she’d enjoyed every one of their coffees and dinners so far. It was so nice to have someone to talk all the creative dilemmas through with. He was a good listener and a good guy, and he seemed to understand. She would make him another dinner and they’d sit and talk rich-old-white-guy Shylock over with wine, coffee and cigarettes. And she’d ask him how his studio struggles were going. Was he winning? Was he finally tapping into his creativity? Maybe he would even let her see some of his work. To date, he’d been as secretive about what was going on in his studio as she had been about what she was tapping into her laptop.

  ‘I’ll show you mine when you’re ready to read me yours,’ he’d joked the last time they’d spoken about this.

  And another thing… she was going to ask him to move back into his own house. It just seemed too ridiculous that a man with a broken ankle, on crutches, was living and working in a shed at the bottom of his garden when she had his entire, beautiful four-bedroomed house to herself. Plus it had rained heavily last night and she wondered if his garden room was totally watertight.

  There was nothing, absolutely nothing ulterior about asking him to move back in. And she was sure he wouldn’t read anything into it either. They were friends in art. Discussing art, creating art, talking late into the night about art, enjoying the thrill of being alive and creating work, that’s what this was about. And it was work that required thought and effort, but that they could one day stand back and be proud of… well, that was the aim.

  Yes, she was already planning what to make for dinner and what they would drink alongside it. She definitely wanted Dave to show her his art.

  As Tess drove into the car park of the Getty Center, she remembered why she’d thought LA would be amazing to visit. These buildings were stunning; the setting was stunning and the blue sky and bright sun all around made her heart soar.

  She parked up. This had been a drive along relatively quiet ‘freeways’ and not quite as much of a driving-a-new-car trauma as she’d expected. She checked herself in the car mirror. Hair, still blonde, still curled, still pink. She liked her breezy white blouse, tucked into a linen pencil skirt that she was wearing with wedgy espadrilles. She had earrings in and make-up on. She’d had time… time to prep herself, time to fuss, time to accessorise with her sunglasses, her lipstick and her nice earrings.

  And now she went into the modern building and was greeted like a friend (the Californian way). She bought the guidebook, but declined the headphones, and began to walk around the stunning rooms, slowly taking in every fabulous painting and sculpture… drinking it all in.

  She looked at the views out of the huge glass windows almost as much as she looked at the art. She took her time. Sitting down on the benches, reading the guidebooks and really looking. And after an hour or so in the gallery, Tess found the Cézanne painting she’d been looking for and sat quietly in front of it.

  When she’d first met Dave at a student friend’s party, they’d drunk truly rank cider and talked about this very painting, Still Life with Apples. He was weirdly impressed that even though she was studying accountancy, she knew all about it.

  And now, sitting here looking at it in the flesh, all these years later, she couldn’t help thinking back to the lives she thought they might have when she married Dave. She thought they would stay in London and that they would work hard enough and have the kind of success that would bring them one of those houses… up a quiet street in Kensington: red brick, two storeys, just the right size for a small family. She’d thought he would be an artist… and a successful one. Someone who got her invited to glamorous gallery openings at the Serpentine… or to see Saatchi’s latest exhibitions.

  But it had got too hard, too hard for her to carve a career path in London with talented sharks at every turn, especially when she wanted to get off the career treadmill, at least for a little bit, to have children. So when a comfortable, but far less glamorous, opportunity had come up in the ‘sticks’ of Leamington, she’d not exactly jumped at it, but she’d persuaded herself it was the right thing to do. And Dave might like to say he gave up art when they moved up there and he took the school job to give them stability during her maternity years… but really, he’d given up on art some time before that. And moving to Leamington was about moving away from the crowd that he was ruthlessly comparing himself to, and considering himself as a failure.

  Why had those guys had so much success when he’d fallen away? Out loud, she would say: ‘Oh art, it’s so subjective, his things weren’t quite the right fit, the group he was with… they were moving in a different direction…’ But really, in her heart, she believed it was because he just didn’t want it as much as they did. He wasn’t as obsessed with creating or as hungry for success as the others had been then and still were now. Occasionally, when she came across a Van Saint interview, she couldn’t believe how he still managed to pull off such outward cool with the ruthless drive for money and success that she remembered even back when he was starting out. Dave had always been so much more relaxed, more fun, more easy-going and while that made him a lovely person to be around, it probably didn’t make him a great artist.

  Was he disappointed in himself? She wasn’t sure. Maybe this desire to paint, mentioned every summer, meant that he was. She wondered how he was finding the painting… when she asked on their calls, he simply told her, ‘Fine, fine, going well.’ No further details.

  Yes, Dave was easy-going, warm natured… the fun person in their relationship, while she picked up the organising, the running and the managing, not to mention earning the significantly bigger salary. His seven-week summer holidays… staring out of an art gallery window at an LA landscape shimmering in the late afternoon haze, she realised how jealous she was of his long and languid summers.

  He was Mr Fun and she was Mrs Do Everything Else. That’s how the chips had fallen in their marriage. And now that she didn’t have him around, she realised that she was relaxing… easing out from under her burden of responsibilities and trying to work out what she liked doing and how to properly take care of all aspects of her life.

  Are we going to get divorced? She asked herself the swift, sharp question, probing the tender spot she kept coming back to.

  Probably.

  When she came back from her trip that was probably the most likely answer. Dragging this weary, struggling marriage on through more years filled with nothing but effort… she didn’t want to do that. The thought of packing up and leaving Ambleside, the thought of no more ‘the four of us’ – family holidays, family Christmases, family dinners even – that was all going to be unbearably hard. But surely better than carrying around resentment for her husband and for the marriage they should have ha
d in her mind every single day for the rest of her life?

  Somehow, she would find the courage and the strength to start afresh.

  Long minutes passed as she stared at the Cézanne. She tried to just enjoy it, let it flood her mind, calm her feelings. But finally, she couldn’t shake off all the thoughts in her head, so she went in search of the gallery’s café.

  Rice salad and green tea. This was the kind of thing you ate and drank when you were a gallery goer in LA. She scrolled through her phone as she ate. There was Natalie, taking unbelievably pretty pictures of herself and the new boyfriend against a background of dazzling blue sky. Dave had even posted a pic or two of the roses blooming in the garden, tagging her ‘@Tess will want to see these’. Was that River? Tess looked beyond the roses and saw an elegant woman with a mane of dark hair sitting at the table on Tess’s decking. There were two coffee cups on the table… she hadn’t considered that River and Dave might hang out together. She scrolled on… friends were posting summer holiday snaps, homemade birthday cakes, drinks in the garden, brand-new shoes. And there in her messages queue was all that Alex was going to give her right now:

  All fine with me Mum, don’t worry