by Marian Keyes
They belonged to the elusive third party, “us.” The person or energy, or whatever you want to call it, that was formed by the union of James and me. Which was much more than the sum of its parts.
How I wished I could find the missing “us.” If only I could track it down and lure it back with offers of all these wonderful possessions. Like some awful third-rate game show host. See that lovely television.
It’s yours. Now will you stay?
Have a look at the fine remodeled kitchen.
Beautiful, isn’t it? Well, it can all be yours if only you’ll come back.
Though I suppose you wouldn’t get anything like a remodeled kitchen on a third-rate game show.
You’d be lucky to get your bus fare home.
But I wished that it could be as easy as that to get the James and Claire
“us” back.
Or if all I had to do would be to put an announcement on the evening news that said something like “Would the James and Claire ‘us,’ last known to be touring the [let’s just say] Kerry area please contact the police in Dublin for an urgent message.”
But it looked like the “us” wasn’t just missing. It was dead. Killed by James.
And it died intestate.
In theory the state inherits all the possessions belonging to “us.”
In practice, of course, nothing so surreal and ridiculous as that was going to happen.
Now pass me that saw, would you?
You see, I firmly believe that there was only one way to deal with unpleasant situations—and what was my current situation if not unpleasant? And that was to take a deep breath, face them fairly and squarely, look them in the eye, stare them down and show them who’s boss.
I really believed very strongly in this.
And perhaps one day I might even take my own advice and actually do it.
To sum up my attitude, let me just tell you that I don’t think I have ever, in my whole life, done the dishes on the actual night of a dinner party.
I always promised myself that I would. That waking up, with a hangover, to filthy plates and a kitchen that looked like a battleground was too horrible to contemplate. But you know what it’s like.
The end of the evening has rolled around and the table is strewn with half-full dishes of melting baked Alaska, which I have more or less abandoned.
Now I must say, in my defense, that up to this point I am usually a model hostess, positively dancing attendance on my guests, ferrying plates and dishes and cutlery to and from the kitchen as though I was on a con-veyor belt. However, my sense of hospitality decreases in direct proportion to the number of glasses of wine that I’ve had, so by dessert and coffee time I am usually far too relaxed (all right then, far too drunk, if you will insist on calling a spade a spade) and no longer feel any need to clear the table.
If the table had collapsed in front of me under the weight of the uncleared dishes, I would have just laughed.
If my guests wanted a clean table I’m afraid that they’d have had to do it themselves. They knew where the kitchen was. Were they waiting for an engraved invitation?
In the middle of the table there always was a completely untouched bowl of fruit.
I mean, what’s the problem? Fruit is lovely.
I always bought fruit and no one ever ate it. Protestant dessert, Judy called it. My friends said that it was bad enough for me to insult them by offering them something like a banana or an orange for dessert. That their idea of a decent dessert—nay, their only idea of a dessert—was something positively bursting with saturated fats and refined sugar and double cream and alcohol and egg whites and cholesterol. The kind of dessert that your arteries contract an inch or two just from looking at. I was sure that they developed such attitudes in their deprived childhoods.
So the upshot was that I always bought fruit and my guests always never ate it. If you follow me.
And the view of the table was always obscured by about a thousand glasses, several of them overturned, with their contents, be it white wine, gin and tonic, Irish coffees or Baileys, fast spreading out and intermingling and making friends with each other on the tablecloth, forming little seas around the islands of salt, which some conscientious poor soul (usually James) had thrown down to halt the trail of devastation wreaked by the advancing hordes of spilled red wine.
And I would be on my twenty-second Sambucca and reclin- ing on the two back legs of my chair, or sitting on James’s knee telling anyone who’d listen how much I love him.
I had no shame.
My sobriety was less than judgelike, but I was at one with the universe.
Every morning after a party I staggered down to the kitchen and for a second I paused with my hand on the kitchen doorknob and had a beautiful warm fantasy that when I flung wide the door the place would be gleaming, the sun glinting off the polished surfaces, all the cups and plates and bowls and pots and pans scrubbed and put away (in the correct cupboards).
Instead, as I gingerly picked my way through the debris, I was hard-pressed to find even an unbroken glass for my much-needed couple of aspirin, never mind a clean one.
And while we’re on the subject of dinner parties, I’d like the answer to a couple of questions.
Why, at dinner parties, does someone always tear all the paper off the labels on all the bottles of wine, so that when you come down in the morning the table is covered with little annoying sticky scraps of paper that stick to everything?
Why do I always use the butter dish as an ashtray?
Why does at least one person always say—usually fairly late in the evening—“I wonder what Dubonnet and Guinness would taste like?” or
“What would happen if I lit my glass of Jack Daniels?”
And then proceed to find out.
Just for the record, the Guinness causes the Dubonnet to curdle in the most disgusting fashion and the Jack Daniels goes up like a Kuwaiti oil well, blistering the paint on the dining room ceiling.
To be fair to James—although why should I, the bastard—he was always very good about housework and especially about cleaning up after said dinner parties. He never got as drunk as I did, so at the very least he was in a fit condition to move most of the carnage from the dining table to the kitchen so that in the morning one room was fairly presentable. Apart from, of course, the Jack Daniels scorch marks on the ceiling. But at least I knew I could paint over them.
Again. I had some paint left from the last dinner party.
And the inevitable couple of hungover bodies usually to be found in an unshaven and disheveled state (and that’s just the women) on the living room couch. In fact, they were nearly harder to get rid of than said scorch marks on the ceiling. Or the cigarette burns on the carpet.
Lying around for half the day, groaning and demanding cups of tea and aspirin and saying that they’ll vomit if they move.
Anyway, I was doing it again.
Procrastinating, that is.
Trying to make myself think about the practicalities of no longer being with James was like trying to make myself look directly at the sun on a really bright day. Hard to do either, and they both made my eyes water.
I suppose I’d better think about the custody of Kate problem. Although was it a problem? James hadn’t shown the slightest bit of interest in her.
And, after all, he was the (boo, hiss!) adulterer. And because of this, what with him being the wrongdoer and everything, I supposed custody would be automatically awarded to me.
But instead of feeling triumphant about it, I didn’t even feel relieved.
This was no victory.
I wanted James to care about our child.
I wanted my child to have a father.
I would have much preferred for James to bring me to court and indulge in bitter verbal battles and slander me by calling me a lesbian or a woman of low morals (no grounds for slander there, I’m afraid) or whatever. Because, by trying to ge
t custody of Kate by blackening my name, he would at least be caring about her.
I hugged Kate fiercely. I felt so guilty. Because somehow, somewhere, without my even knowing that I was doing it, I had messed up and because of that, poor Kate, innocent little bystander, had to do without her dad.
I just couldn’t understand James.
Didn’t he have any curiosity at all about Kate?
I couldn’t make sense of it.
Was it because Kate is a girl? If the baby had been a boy would James have tried to make a go of things with me?
Who knew? I was just trying to make sense of a senseless situation.
And what about our apartment?
We had bought it together and it was in both our names. So what did we do?
Sell it and split the proceeds?
Me buy out his share and live there with Kate?
Me sell James my share and let him live there with Denise?
No way!
Over my dead body.
You know, anytime I’d heard people saying that passionately I just thought that they were being all Mediterranean and hot-blooded. That they were just playing to the camera and overreacting. And I knew that I’d said it myself thousands of times, but I’d never really meant it until that minute.
But I meant it, really meant it then.
And what about money? How on earth was I going to manage to support Kate and myself on my salary?
I felt as if I’d wandered out onto a balcony and suddenly realized, to my horror, that there was no ground at all beneath me. Just lots and lots of limitless, empty space for me to fall through.
The thought of being without money was terrifying.
I felt as though I was nothing.
That I was just this faceless woman afloat in a big hostile universe with absolutely nothing to anchor me to anything.
I hated myself for being so insecure and so dependent. I should have been a strong, sassy, independent, nineties woman. The type of woman who has strong views and who goes to the movies on her own and who cares about the environment and can change a fuse and goes for aromather-apy and has an herb garden and can speak fluent Italian and has a session in a flotation tank once a week and doesn’t need a man to shore up her fragile sense of self-esteem.
But the fact is, I wasn’t.
I was perfectly happy to be a homemaker while my husband went out to earn the loot.
And if my husband was prepared to share the household chores as well as earn the lion’s share of the loot, then so much the better.
I suppose I wanted to have my cake and eat it.
But then again, what were you going to do with your cake if not eat it?
Frame it?
Use it as a sachet in your underwear drawer?
How were James and I going to separate the funds from our joint bank account? I would have nearly given up all rights to the money to save all the inevitable wrangling. The only thing that was stopping me was the idea of James’s spending it on Denise.
Besides, I’d seen a really nice pair of shoes yesterday in the mall and I wanted them for my own.
I can’t describe the feeling of immediate familiarity that rushed between us. The moment I clapped eyes on them I felt like I already owned them. I could only suppose that we were together in a former life. That they were my shoes when I was a serving maid in medieval Britain or when I was a princess in ancient Egypt. Or perhaps they were the princess and I was the shoes. Who’s to know? Either way I knew that we were meant to be together.
And I had no immediate access to funds. Therefore I had to lay claim to my money in England.
Sordid and unpleasant as it might be.
My head swam slightly at all this, kind of like the way it had swum the night before when Mum started her Cher and Ike conversation.
Little did I think, the warm April day three years ago when I married James, that our union would end in such a way. That something that started out as such good fun and so full of hope and excitement could end in heartbreak and legalese.
That I would be dealing in so many clichés.
Arguing about money and possessions.
I’d always thought that James and I would be different. That even though we might be married there was no reason that we had to act it, goddammit!
That fun and love and passion would always be the most important things to us.
I’d vowed that there would never come a day when I would walk into a room and say to James, without even looking at him, “The tiles in the bathroom are coming loose. You’d better take a look at them.” Or, again giving him but the most cursory of glances, “I hope you’re not thinking of wearing that sweater to the Reynolds’ dinner.”
Hadn’t I realized that thousands of women before me had made a pact with themselves never to lose the magic in their marriages? The same way that they fiercely promised themselves that they would never let their gray hair show, would never let their breasts droop, would never get wrinkles.
But it still happened.
Their will wasn’t strong enough to fight the inevitable, to reverse the waves of time.
And neither was mine.
I lay Kate back down in her bassinet while I went to take a shower. I was obviously really getting to grips with this living business, I thought to myself proudly.
“Cleanliness,” I told Kate, feeling very self-righteous, feeling that I was a Good Mother, “is next to godliness. And I’ll tell you what godliness is when you’re a bit older.”
In the shower, I couldn’t stop thinking about James. Not in a maudlin or bitter way. Just remembering how great it had been. Really, even though he had hurt me in a way I never thought he would, I couldn’t forget just how great it was with him.
When I first met James and we were out with other people, I would watch him across a room, talking to someone else. I would always think to myself how sexy and handsome he looked. Especially if he was looking all serious and accountantlike. That always made me smile. He looked as if he was no fun at all.
But let me tell you, I knew differently.
And it gave me such a thrill to know that when the party or whatever had ended my man would be coming home with me. I wanted it always to be like that.
I had met a man who loved me unconditionally. Even better than the unconditional love that my mother had for me, because unfortunately that unconditional love had certain conditions attached.
And he’d made me laugh in the same way that my sisters or my girlfriends could make me laugh. But it was even better because I didn’t usually wake up in the same bed as my sisters or my girlfriends.
So the opportunities for having a good laugh with James were far more plentiful and in far better places.
And about far better places too, I suppose.
You know, I thought if anyone was going to have an affair that it would be me. Not that I thought I would have had one, if you know what I mean.
But I was always the loud rowdy one who was regarded as great fun.
And popular opinion held James to be the sensible reliable one. Quiet, self-contained, as steady as a rock.
That’s the trouble with men who wear suits and reading glasses and who fix you with a sincere gaze and say things like “Well, in a period of low inflation, a fixed-rate mortgage is your best bet,” or “I would sell the treasury stock and buy government equities,” or some such similar statement.
You get hoodwinked into thinking that they’re as dull as ditchwater and as safe as houses.
And I suppose that even I did a bit with James.
I felt that I could behave or misbehave in any fashion that took my fancy and he would smile tolerantly on me. He was amused by me.
No, not amused. That sounds sort of patronizing and disdainful.
But he was certainly entertained by me.
He really thought I was great.
And I, on the other hand, felt very safe and secure and
protected with James.
The very fact that I knew I could make a fool of myself and James would still love me insured that I didn’t make a fool of myself.
I didn’t get drunk very often anymore.
But even in the days when I did and I would wake up the next morning with a pounding headache and cringing from the few snippets of what I could remember of the previous evening, he would be so sweet.
He would laugh kindly and get me glasses of water and lean over and kiss me on my throbbing forehead as I lay like a corpse in the bed and say soothing things like “No, sweetie, you weren’t obnoxious. You were really funny,” and “No, darling, you weren’t overbearing. You had us all in stitches,” and “Your bag will turn up. It was probably under some coats at Lisa’s. I’ll call her now,” and “Of course you can look those people in the eye again. I mean, everyone was plastered. You weren’t the drunkest by any stretch of the imagination.”
And on one really awful occasion, my worst “morning after” ever, I think—the promises to never drink again were thick on the ground that morning, I can tell you—“Hurry up, angel, your hearing is at nine-thirty.
You can’t be late because the lawyer said your judge is a bastard.”
Now look, wait a minute. Just let me explain. Please hear me out.
Yes, I was arrested one night but it wasn’t because I did anything illegal.
I was simply in the wrong place at the wrong time. I just happened to be somewhere that just happened to be an unlicensed drinking club. I had no idea that the people running the place were doing anything criminal.
Apart from the price they were charging for the wine.
And the suits the bouncers were wearing. The suits alone deserved ten years in solitary confinement.
I don’t know how I managed to get mixed up in it. All I know for sure is that drink was taken and spirits were high.
When we saw the policemen entering the club and everyone started hiding their drinks under their tables, Judy and Laura and I thought it was great fun.
“Just like Prohibition,” we laughingly agreed.
I decided that I would tell my favorite joke to some of the policemen, which is the one that goes: How many policemen does it take to break a lightbulb? The answer being, of course, none. It fell down the stairs.
