Acts of Desperation

by Megan Nolan

  At home I poured myself a glass while I cooked and drank it slowly, smugly, as he ignored me.

  When we had finished dinner, I went on drinking as I read my book until it was time to sleep and I rinsed the empty bottle carefully and put it in the recycling bin as he watched me from the couch.

  I thought this event would weaken his position, the hypocrisy of it coming from someone who smoked all day long, but in the end it bolstered him. He decided to double down, that health concerns made his distaste unimpeachably legitimate.

  He emailed me studies about young professional women developing cirrhosis, and charts with the number of calories in each drink. When I lingered over some fine line around my eyes in the mirror he would lean over my shoulder and explain that drinking would age me faster, finishing with a cheerful kiss to the top of my head.

  Before long it had spread to other parts of our life, too. He chided me on the mornings I got a bus rather than walk to work. If I complained that an item of clothing didn’t fit me any more, or wept with sadness at the state of my body when in the middle of a depression, he would patiently explain that I would lose weight if I went vegan – Freja was a vegan, after all.

  Once he went to see his dentist to get some fillings done and came home extolling the virtues of flossing.

  ‘I don’t want to,’ I would say as he tried to force it on me in the mornings, wriggling out of his grip and trying to get out the door to work before he got his shoes on and caught up with me.

  ‘I don’t CARE if you do it or not,’ he screamed at me once, ‘I just want you to understand this, understand what I’m telling you: one day your teeth are going to fall out of your fucking head, and it will be your fault, not mine.’

  One cold Sunday morning, getting ready to go for a walk into town, eat lunch, and go to the cinema, we stood next to each other, him shaving, me brushing my teeth. We were in good moods, him winking at me in the bathroom mirror when we caught eyes.

  I spat into the sink and went to rinse the foam away but he seized my wrist and held it still on the tap.

  ‘Do you see that?’ he asked.

  ‘Wh-what?’ I cried, alarmed.

  He peered down into the spit and then took a finger and dispersed it, combed through it. A thin, bright red strand ran through.

  ‘Blood,’ he said. ‘That’s blood. That’s disease. That’s what happens when you don’t floss. Do you see now?’ And he cupped the back of my neck, not unkindly, and slowly forced my head down close to the spit, so I could see it clearly; it was an inch from my nose; I felt my throat rise.

  See?

  11

  I drank more in front of him from then on, a beer or two before dinner most nights, wine towards the weekend.

  I was rarely drunk, and that was a part of it. If I crossed over into sloppiness as he sat there sober, I would lose the game entirely. His unspoken point would be proven. But if I could drink and maintain composure, he would have no basis for his evident disgust.

  There were things about me he could legitimately criticise. I never exercised, was as sullenly unfit as I had been in PE as a child. When he chided me for this (he who cycled everywhere and could run for miles), all I could do was lower my eyes and say, ‘I know, I know.’

  But the drinking was different. If I forced him to become angry about it, it would make him look ridiculous. I was acting comically poised, after all. I was sitting reading the Sunday supplements, having cooked him a nutritious and inventive meal, holding a civilised glass of fairly good wine, the only untoward or slatternly thing about me the blush which arrived from the alcohol and the faintly sexual thrill of inciting his irritation.

  Then I came home to him pouring bottles of wine down the sink one evening, and was quietly delighted.

  When I asked what he thought he was doing, he answered that he wanted to make new rules for the house.

  He wanted us to cut down on smoking, he said, for our health and because it made the apartment smell bad. And since I only ever smoked when I drank, we would simply make it a rule that smoking – and therefore drinking – was permitted only on one night.

  Just one – I could choose which.

  ‘What about you?’ I asked.

  ‘Yes, me too,’ he replied, and I almost laughed aloud that he was willing to do this to himself.

  ‘Fine,’ I said. ‘Good idea, baby.’ And I kissed his soft unshaven cheek, rubbing my nose along it.

  Usually I got home an hour or two before Ciaran did and it occurred to me that it was possible for me to drink before he arrived and to continue once he had.

  If it was a night when drinking was allowed, I could, for instance, be home with two bottles of wine by five thirty, drink the first, dispose of it, and be sitting waiting for him with the first glass poured and a cigarette lit when he arrived home.

  The almost-full bottle would be waiting there alongside me to prove everything was in order. I could easily suppress my drunkenness in front of a comparative amateur like Ciaran.

  And so that is what I did. Sometimes if I was running late it was a struggle. I remember draining the end of a bottle of rosé prosecco in one burpy rush, my eye on the clock, and running down to the dumpster with only minutes to go.

  But at night, when we had finished watching films or television, and he had had his beers and I had finished my second bottle, when we were going to sleep – it was all worth it then. I closed my eyes and felt the blissful wooze of being secretly, silently pissed, and of getting away with it, of being one person, and also another.

  And then it was Saturday afternoons. I began to invent a social life for myself.

  ‘Christina wants to have coffee with me today,’ I’d say, or, ‘Lisa is back from Berlin so we’re going to see a film and have dinner,’ and he’d barely look up from what he was writing or drawing or the application he was filling in.

  It occurred to me uncomfortably that he hadn’t stopped me seeing my friends, as I sometimes posited in the privacy of my own head. He didn’t care about them. I had stopped myself.

  I would get ready, get really quite dressed up, in flippy dresses and soft cardigans and little boots, would pull on my hat, put on red lipstick. I did my make-up perfectly, as I rarely bothered to do any more, and walked to a little bistro named Chez Max at the foot of Dublin Castle.

  Lisa and I had come here a lot when she lived in Dublin to drink their house red and share onion soup and fries, smoke too many cigarettes.

  On my walk there I would buy two newspapers, fat with supplements, and arrange them in front of me on the table, would sit down beneath the heat lamp, take off my coat and lay my cigarettes next to the papers. I nodded to the waiters, who knew my order. I sat there all afternoon slowly drinking wine and smoking and reading.

  They treated me like a celebrity because I came so often, on my own, and had visibly made an effort to look pretty. I couldn’t tell if they admired or pitied this but I didn’t mind. It became the part of my week I most looked forward to.

  Why didn’t I actually meet the friends I said I was going to? I could have, they were still around, were still willing to see me when I asked.

  It wasn’t that I didn’t want to see them. It was that I wanted it to be not true, where I was. I wanted there to be a thing he could not know.

  12

  Sex with him began, slowly, to fail to excite me.

  His body was still as remarkable, as porelessly beautiful, as it had ever been. I could still spend hours exploring it, marvelling at its effortless grace, its movie-star glow. And yes, it was true, I could still forget everything momentarily when he lay there dormant or near sleep and let me burrow down and run my face against the insanely soft fuzz of his strong, long thighs. He felt the same, tasted right, smelled as good.

  But there was something unreal to him, doll-like almost. I struggled to feel his touch. Things he used to do which would render me a quivering strand of pure feeling barely registered now. It was a strange thing to have his long beautiful fi
ngers brush circles on my nipples and remember quite clearly how it once would have made me senseless with need, but feel nothing much at all.

  I was able to perform my passion, having learned the movements so long ago, but it shocked me that he couldn’t tell the difference when I shuddered and gasped my way through a faked orgasm. I might have been doing it all this time, I thought, for all he knew, and felt both proud and frightened of my aloneness, of the impossibility of being known.

  I could only get wet when I went down on him, placing his hands behind my head, encouraging him to use me like that. I looked up at him and then could gather some of what I’d once felt; the power of that male sneer, that old faithful angle.

  He was a little rough at times, but I could sense he did it out of kindness, knowing it was something I liked.

  When I had once told him that I liked men to be rough with me, I had stopped short of describing exactly what it was I liked, or why, and what about it turned me on. But because I had said it once, he believed he knew all there was to know about me, and I was too embarrassed to bring it up again. I was too embarrassed to say: No, it’s not enough.

  To say, I see you try, but in fact it’s worse than nothing to see you make a plan to hold me in a certain way, to see you make a decision and execute what you think will work best for me.

  I want you to want to do it. That’s the only way. I want it to all be as fluid and natural as the movement of you swatting a fly, as baked into your physiology as a thing like that.

  You hate me, I thought sometimes, when you see me drink or cry or cut myself, but you don’t hate me in the right way.

  Your disgust is domesticated. I fear that your distaste is that of your average husband – not the glittering and sexual kind you used to show me when you looked down at me, before I won you.

  2019, Athens

  Maybe the thing I fear most of all is losing sex. Sex is so wonderful because it is one of the few things in adult life which can completely take you out of yourself. There is a pure singularity to it which leaves no room for your ordinary mind. All the things I love most – sex, romance, drinking – are like that.

  I know what I want should count. What I desire ought to be as important as what you think when you look at me, but all the things which excite me, which make me as physical and voracious and forceful as a man, are to do with things being done to me. Always things are being done to me. Rarely do I do things myself.

  When I was younger and still believed myself to be hideous, I used to think of my body as one that men liked to sleep with, but not to look at. I willed this into truth by never letting them look at me. I made love in the dark and covered myself afterwards, clumsy and childlike, so that they really did never look at me.

  Once I told this theory of mine to a man named Luca when I was seventeen on a trip to Berlin. He was older, in his mid twenties, and part of the group I was holidaying with. I didn’t know him as well as I did the others and was attracted by his arrogant smirk and casual dismissals of things not to his taste, whether that was a book or a person or a food. We were drunk and sitting on a kerb in Kreuzberg after a bar shut and I told him my feelings in a foolish gush of earnestness. He seemed sympathetic and said mild, comforting things in response.

  Even later, when we had all been ejected from another club, our friend Sophie was talking about her yoga practice and how fit and strong she had become, when Luca turned to me and said, ‘Perhaps you should take that up too,’ and smiled slowly and the casual cruelty stunned me so much that I cried into my paper cup of vodka.

  I walked shakily away from the group, wandering until I found a patch of grass to collapse down on and wallow in my absurd misery. An old weathered woman wearing several coats in the warm July dawn came and sat with me and offered to share her booze. ‘Is it a man?’ she asked, and I nodded, although it wasn’t the kind of trouble she must have thought it was. The next night, predictably, Luca and I slept together.

  I made mistakes like that all the time, seeking affirmation from the very worst people, so that what I must have been after deep down was confirmation of the fears instead of their dismissals. Luca and others confirmed for me that I truly was a thing built for use and base pleasure – but not to be looked at with pleasure, not to be beautiful or pristine. And so sex was what I could count on, a definite expression of my purpose. I learned to like that well enough to make up for the lack of beauty – learned to love it, rely on it enough to make my navigation of the places I went and lived in feel safe and fun.

  Sometimes that skill slipped away from me without warning. I gained a lot of weight very quickly while in the middle of some crisis, maybe, so that none of my clothes fit and I walked around hunched over and frightened. Not infrequently I suffered inexplicable allergy flare-ups, which would make the skin on my face explode into strange and unsightly red welts around my eyes and mouth. They made me look diseased and haggard, twenty years older than I was. Walking around Dublin when that happened was a kind of hell, all my reliable tricks undone in an instant. A man would begin to size up my body and then recoil when he arrived to the face. It cut into me so much I could barely function and sometimes didn’t, taking to my bed until I could pass for more or less good-looking again.

  I don’t know who to be without sex. I don’t know how to access the ways of being which bring me relief and joy. Everything which does is bound up in sex somehow. The songs I listen to, all attached to someone I’ve been obsessed with. The films which break my heart, huge gorgeous eyes flooding the screen, showing impossible dynamics, passion which goes on and on and never ends because it can always be rewound.

  And most of all, the feeling of walking around a foreign city: off an airbus in a short dress and sunglasses, a hopeful prayer for adventure pranging in my chest, feeling seen, made real anew by all the people who look with admiration or curiosity; those exchanges making it seem as though I could be anyone at all, begin new stories, live a thousand lives.

  13

  Once, when I was a child of eight or nine, I came downstairs in the night, confused from dreaming and looking for water. When I opened the kitchen door, lit up in the hallway half-light was a girlfriend of my father’s who had fallen asleep there at the table with a cigarette in her hand. Her dressing gown had fallen open and I could see her small breasts slack against her chest and was frightened by the sight.

  I thought of her at strange times over the years – there were a dozen or so childhood images like that one, of partners of one or other of my parents, moments I was too young to understand or contextualise and so they stuck with me (the French pastry chef who emerged grinning from the bathroom with his dick flopping out of his boxers, whispering something I can’t remember).

  The girlfriend hadn’t been ugly or old, she didn’t disturb me because she was decrepit. She was attractive and slim and buoyant in waking life, and this night remained with me only because it was a sight which taught me that a woman’s nudity was not always erotic, not even always pleasant, was, indeed, at times pathetic to behold.

  14

  One evening near Christmas, having left his computer at work, Ciaran asked to use mine to send some emails. I realised afterwards he had not logged out, and then remembered standing in his kitchen at dawn in that time which felt so long ago, reading the endless, desperate, adoring message from Freja.

  I felt sick with the sudden surge of power and possibility I had before me. There was no time limit. I could look at every single thing he had ever said about me, or ever said to her. I could see, finally, how their Christmas reconciliation and subsequent split came about, what he was thinking when he came back to me, whether he truly wanted to.

  For days afterwards I pored through them at any spare moment I could find in work. My nausea rose. I felt myself filling up with his minutiae. I was engorged with him like an insect fat with blood.

  But it was all so much nothing, so much nothing I did not already know.

  This invasion was filthier than my fi
rst because of its sheer mundanity. At least then there had been something to be legitimately scandalised by.

  Now, I was bored. There were cruel parts, certainly, parts hard to stomach: her cloying attempts to undermine me and my looks; his feverish need to keep reassuring her that I was only temporary, nothing real, nothing like her.

  So what? I thought, scrolling.

  I needed more, to be hurt more. I wanted to see that they continued to cheat, that they were planning to run away together, that they wanted to kill me.

  I wanted lists of every flaw in my body, every way in which I was laughable and the object of their amused pity.

  It was all so ordinary and underwhelming. They were just two idiots in a mess, who kept convincing and then un-convincing one another of things. They weren’t star-crossed, just dithering, dependent people who couldn’t stay away from each other because they hadn’t worked out how to imagine anything different.

  I had given up so much to be a part of this drama and I saw now how bad the part, how shoddy the script.

  I kept looking, to find something, to justify the looking, until I arrived all the way back to years earlier, before I had met him. He had sent her a photograph he had taken of the two of them in bed, him kneeling over her and holding his dick above her plump, bare vagina. I looked, horribly compelled, and then logged out quickly and deleted his account from my computer.

  That night I dreamed that I was him fucking Freja. I had dreamed of sleeping with her before, or of watching him do it, but in the dream I was him, full of him, full up with him, it was my dick stiff and purple brushing against her.

  From then on I would never be really jealous of her again. The feelings would still be there somewhere, when he talked about her or I saw her online, but just as reflex. They were at a remove, not a part of my real self any more. It was as though I had been struck with a belt for years, and suddenly my flesh was replaced with something else, something inanimate. The pain was still going on, but it was no longer happening to me, it was happening to a statue.