38
This was the Wednesday after you went away, allegedly to Los Angeles. Where you really were, whether or not the trip had any true business motive, only you know. I remember that, when you called up that next morning, I was in the middle of reading There’s a Monster in My Closet to Maria. And that’s how I felt when I heard the phone – as if there were a monster lurking only one closed door away that would take over my life if I so much as mentioned it by name.
I remember that when I asked you when we could expect you back you snapped at me. ‘Do you think I’m enjoying this? I’ll be home as soon as I can.’
I got the same tone from Ophelia when I called up to check on her. ‘I’m with a patient. I’ll call you back when I have a free moment.’ She didn’t call me back, and when I saw her in front of the school that lunchtime, she pretended to be too busy to talk to me.
You may remember that school ended at noon that Thursday – it was their last day before Christmas. Charlotte had wanted to stay late at the office so that she could go to the department Christmas party, and so she had arranged for me to pick up her kids as well as mine. The plan was for me to take them all to her house: Trey was to relieve me at four so that I could do my swim.
When I got to Charlotte’s house, I found Becky and her girls waiting outside it. ‘Listen,’ she said. ‘I have to go to Marin. I just spoke to Charlotte and she said it would be fine by her if you had my three this afternoon too.’
She smiled. It was the first time she had been at all friendly to me since the disagreement about the document – and maybe this was genuine, maybe she had decided to forget our differences. But because of the way you had treated me on the phone, and because of the way Ophelia had manipulated my sympathies only to discard me a few hours later, I decided that Becky had to be using me, too.
And so I told her that she was free to use me. Everyone else was! She wasn’t to think for a second that I had anything better to do than wait on her hand and foot.
‘Good,’ she said. ‘I’ll be back at three.’
At 3.30 she called to say she would be back at 4.30. At 4.30 she called to say her car radiator wasn’t working. ‘Do you think Trey could keep the girls for the night?’ I told her that Trey had not made an appearance yet. ‘Well, maybe he’s in traffic.’
At 5, there was still no Trey. I tried Charlotte’s office: no answer. At 5.30 the doorbell rang. It was Ophelia, all dressed up, with Seb, in pyjamas. ‘You’re supposed to be Trey,’ she said.
‘Well, fortunately, I’m not.’
‘Do you know when he’s due back?’
‘I haven’t the faintest idea.’
‘Well, I hope you don’t mind if I leave Seb here as planned, because Kiki really wants me to go to this thing with him.’
I think I just stared at her.
‘Am I to deduce from your silence it’s not OK?’
‘No, come right in. Walk all over me.’
‘She did say it was OK,’ Ophelia informed me sternly. ‘And I was led to believe it would be Trey here. Let’s keep our perspective.’
‘Fine,’ I said. ‘I’ll do that.’
‘I’m not trying to say I’m not thankful for everything you did for me last night,’ Ophelia said. ‘It was very helpful to have a different point of view. But I’m sure I distorted things because I was so upset, and I shouldn’t have involved you. That’s why I didn’t call this morning. Also Kiki and I had a long talk, and I think we’ve resolved some important issues. It’s just a question of having the right attitude, don’t you think?’
What about her attitude to me? That’s what I wanted to ask her about, but in the end I just nodded.
‘I knew you’d understand.’ Off she went.
The children picked up on my mood. This made them hyperactive: the game of Candyland they had after supper was one of the worst I have ever witnessed. The arguments about cheating became especially vicious after I discovered that Dottie had hidden Ice-cream Float. I made a big stink about it; and then I shouted at them some more while we were cleaning up and a few more of the cards turned out to be missing, too.
When Patten asked me what was the use of being a demigod if I couldn’t see through simple household surfaces to find the missing Candyland cards, I blew my top. ‘What is this fucking shit?’ I yelled.
Patten burst into tears. ‘OK, OK, I’ll tell you. But please. Don’t zap me.’
‘Don’t zap you with what?’ I asked.
With your special powers,’ he whimpered.
‘I do not have special powers. I am just a man.’
‘But that’s what they all say,’ Patten wailed.
‘That’s what WHO all say?’ I bellowed. I stepped back into the Christmas tree and accidentally knocked it over. This made me even angrier. ‘Why?’ I said to them, ‘why don’t people ever secure their trees property?’ Unfortunately I was able to put it back up as easily as I had first knocked it down.
I can see now that this made them only more impressed with my strength.
As for getting the decorations back where they belonged, this was another matter. And the peanut gallery didn’t help. The children were upset when I told them it was going to be an earlier than usual bedtime. ‘Please,’ they cried. ‘Don’t send us upstairs yet!’ Upstairs, they added, ‘If it comes out of the radiator, would you promise still you’re going to destroy it even if you’re still angry at us?’
‘If what comes out of the radiator?’ I asked.
They said, ‘The Son of Diadoumenos.’
‘The what?
I can’t tell you how it sickened me to think that the children thought of me as some cartoon version of a demigod, when here I was, sitting in another woman’s house doing the babysitting her husband was supposed to be doing, trying to resurrect a tree I had kicked down in a fit of hopeless anger.
Charlotte did not come home when she was supposed to either. By the time I heard the key in the lock, it was long, long past swimming time. I was not in the mood to appreciate her high spirits.
She danced into the room with two colleagues, both of whom were as high as she was. ‘What’s buzzin’, cousin?’ she asked me. Her companions roared with laughter. ‘Do you know what?’ she told me. ‘I’ve been working with these guys for eight years and they never told me they knew all the words from South Pacific.’ They roared again. I did not. ‘Aw, come on, cheer up,’ she said, lurching towards me. ‘It’s Christmas!’
She turned to the other two. ‘I think this man needs cheering up. I think he needs me to make him a Manhattan. But first …’ She sailed to the middle of the floor. ‘You guys are going to have to help me,’ she said. ‘I don’t know if I know all the words. So. Here goes.’ She took off a glove and threw it on the floor. ‘“Take off my gloves!”’ she sang, and then she threw the second glove on to the floor.
‘“… Take off my overcoat!’” She did the same.
‘“I can’t remember, A worse December, To see those icicles fall…”’
I couldn’t take it any more. I brought my fist down on the table. ‘Shut the fuck up!’ I yelled.
‘It’s bad enough,’ I said to their three frozen faces. ‘It’s bad enough to sit here watching Becky letting Mitchell squander all her money, and Ophelia letting Kiki fuck anyone he feels like and YOU keeping up your own fucking ridiculous charade, it’s bad enough to watch you bending over backwards to make life easy for Trey when all he fucking wants to do is fuck you over. It’s bad enough to have to listen to you guys prepare your own funerals and know that if I make a word of protest it will always rebound on me – that’s bad enough. But on top of it all, to have the whole charade be at my expense! Do you know how many hours I have been here today? Do you know the last time I had a free night or, for that matter, a swim?’
Charlotte sat down. ‘You mean Trey didn’t call.’
‘No, he did not fucking call. And you know why? Because he is a total fuck-off. The way he presses your buttons. And you’re supposed to be
smart!’
Charlotte stayed seated at the table. Bleary-eyed, she said, ‘I really am sorry, Mike. Do you mean to tell me that all the kids are here?’
‘They sure as hell are.’
‘Oh Mike, I’m sorry. I had no idea. What can I do to make up for it?’
‘Not a fucking thing except maybe leave me alone.’
‘Is that what you want?’
I said yes, it was. And then, to my surprise, I burst into tears. And while her colleagues try to back out of the house without drawing attention to themselves, while she puts her arms around me and tells me again how sorry she is, I can imagine …
Ophelia sitting alone at the guest of honour table at Kiki’s car dealer’s Christmas party, watching Kiki flirt with the dealer’s new fluffette fiancée. All that talk last night. And what has changed? He still can’t stand her company. He still goes straight to the cutest, youngest, preferably underage chickhead in the place and does his number on her, and the thing that kills her is, he is enjoying himself. After months of stiff self-help bills, what has changed?
She surveys – without sympathy – the other guests, and the bandleader, who sings first ‘Chicago’, then ‘New York, New York’, and then ‘I Left My Heart in San Francisco’. She can’t stand it any more. He is making her act like a hag. She goes into the bathroom (which is still marked ‘Ladies’) and looks at herself and asks herself, how long has she been running off like this, hiding her tears and her disgust?
It doesn’t have to be this way.
How many years does she have left?
As she watches herself in the mirror, as she brushes her teeth, I imagine …
Becky grabbing for a damp towel as she tries to see through her fogged-up window as she drives on to the Golden Gate Bridge. Her heater is still broken, and her patience is about to snap. San Francisco, when it emerges, is bright, but blurred.
She braces herself for the lecture that is awaiting her at home about how it is too expensive these days to celebrate both Christmas and Hannukah. And while she does, I imagine …
Charlotte, standing in front of a steamed-up bathroom mirror, holding a spring-coil diaphragm she is too drunk to insert. It keeps on bouncing out of her hands, landing on Trey’s shaving kit, in the shower stall, on the (thankfully closed) toilet seat. Every time it springs away, she asks, how did this happen?
As I lay in Charlotte’s bed, I asked myself the same question. What had happened to turn a compassionate gesture into such frantic groping? Whose idea had it been to come upstairs? Why, after so many years, did I suddenly want this so desperately?
Therefore
39
The word we liked to use was natural. Our affair had begun – we both agreed – without either of us willing it. It had continued in spite of serious efforts to bring it to a close. If we kept ending up in bed together, it was probably because this was the only thing we did in the course of a normal day for no other reason than it gave us pleasure.
If it created such a strong sense of well-being – how could it be bad? It didn’t take us long to decide that our affair was necessary.
What was our working goal? I remember Charlotte asking me as she rolled on to her side to trace her finger down my back, carelessly allowing her loose-fitting Chinese robe to slip off her shoulder. What we both wanted was a happy equilibrium. Had either of us been able to achieve it within the bounds of marriage? The answer – given the people involved, the ‘baggage’ we had all brought with us, the resulting deadlocks and aggravating circumstances – was no.
It was only since our affair had begun that she had been able to be a good wife. The role of a wife was just that – a role. It did not serve all her needs. No one person could be everything to any one other person.
However.
We still had our commitments. No matter what we did in private, we had to make sure we didn’t hurt the people who depended on us.
Therefore.
Our affair was a good thing so long as it helped us do right by our families.
And so far – well, just look at Trey, she said. For the first time ever, he was thriving! Before, there had always been a part of her that wanted to believe Trey was everything she told him he was. Now, thanks to me, she could see he was basically a fuck-up. But, she was stuck with him. Or rather, she had decided his disappointing performance was no basis for divorce. In this day and age it was unacceptable to abandon a husband just because he was not a good breadwinner. Anyone could be a breadwinner. But only Trey could be the children’s father. It was therefore a question of accepting him as he was – a liability, a drain on her resources, a social embarrassment, but in other, less easily measured ways, a terrific guy. It was a question of learning how to live with him. The obvious answer was to lie.
If he put his shoes on the right feet, she had to act like he had won the Nobel Peace Prize. If he put them on the wrong feet, she had to switch them when he wasn’t looking and still act like he had won the Nobel Peace Prize. If he then forgot to tie his laces and proceeded to trip on them, she had to be there to catch him, and tell him what great progress he was making and assure him that the Nobel Peace Prize was only a baby step away.
Paradoxically!
It had worked. Now that she didn’t believe in him, now that she was so good at pretending to believe in him, he was actually working.
And the children! They didn’t talk back any more. They ate the food she cooked for them, even scraped their plates sometimes, sometimes even conducted civilized conversations with her, as well as with each other. This was because she insisted on higher standards now. Because she had higher self-esteem, because of the support and approval she got from me.
She only hoped she was giving me something back.
It didn’t take her long to figure out that all she had to do was massage me. And didn’t she know how. She would spend half an hour on the backs of my legs, talking all the while in a desultory way about Lacan the thinker. Then she would roll me over and spend another half an hour on the fronts of my legs and the soles of my feet, while feeding me strange, sometimes even inexplicable titbits, about Lacan the man. Before pausing to give me half a hand-job, just enough to make me want to suckle her. And after I had fallen sated on to my back, while she was tactfully working her way up my torso, she would ask me if I needed body oil. Wine? Coffee? Chocolate? To which I would say no! No! Just keep doing what you’re doing. She would roll me over again and say how tense your upper back is, you poor thing, did you pull a muscle while you were swimming? I would say yes, and she would ask how. I would tell her I wasn’t sure, and she would say, ‘It’s stress, it must be. It’s tension. This will help.’ While she kneaded my shoulders and my upper arms, she would say in a gentle but no-nonsense voice, ‘So. Tell me. What’s the state of play at home today?’
I would tell her everything she wanted to hear. I remember lying there with my eyes half closed while she worked my arms and my chest, her hands occasionally straying downwards but never for long, always returning just in time to my thighs or my shoulders – while I told her what you had said and how I had felt about it, how late you had come home, how I had handled it, how I had felt guilty at breakfast, worthless at lunch, and angry by supper because of whatever detail it was that day you hadn’t picked up on.
‘Oh, I don’t know,’ she would say. ‘I can see Laura’s side, too.’ She would then explain to me what it was like to be finding one’s way as a newly independent woman and discuss the importance of respecting new boundaries. She would support her ideas with little stories from the early days of her own career, and suggest, always indirectly, that some good things could happen if I could manage to ‘let go’ and/or ‘turn away’ so that the ‘drama’ could ‘play itself out’.
She had to work harder to get the lowdown on Becky, but little by little she drew the story out of me. She took it with amazing breeziness. The nitpicking episode even made her laugh. ‘You men,’ she said. ‘You think everything is a come-on.’ Havi
ng kneaded out of me a full account of the tensions between me and Mitchell, she suggested that perhaps a little of it was projection on my part? This would be only natural, because Becky was attractive, and I was a man. Perhaps more importantly, the boundaries were unclear – this type of confusion often provided the spark. That said, she could understand my rage when I figured out how Mitchell was using Becky’s money.
But. There was nothing I could do about it. Becky was the only one who could get herself out of that mess. So long as Becky continued in what Charlotte called her child-bride mode, there was no reaching her. The best any of us could do was make it hard for her to lie to herself. In the meantime, she advised me to call Becky up and make peace with her.
I followed her advice – and yes, after so many weeks of Charlotte’s graveness, it was a relief to have a few jokes with Becky again. It was a relief to know that these would not lead me, as they always did with Charlotte, into a deep discussion about human nature.
I remember the first time Charlotte drove up to the school gates and saw Becky and me laughing together again. Her smile was grave and approving, her wave, as she declined to join us, was almost maternal. ‘I’m so glad to see I’m helping to make your life richer,’ was what she told me later on the phone. And that was the line she continued to hold even when it had to have become clear to her that she had helped to do far more than that.
Occasionally she asked a polite question. Had the ice-cream I had shared with Becky been good? Was the movie we had gone to together worth seeing? That article Becky and I had been chuckling over – was the story funny enough to bear repeating? I think there were times, when the three of us were together, when she wondered what the joke was, but her better nature had a horrible way of prevailing. She did not intrude.
Becky, on the other hand, was unashamedly curious. She had noticed a change in Charlotte’s behaviour. She wanted to know what had caused it, and why Charlotte hadn’t told her about it. Didn’t Charlotte trust her any more? Hadn’t she, Becky, always told Charlotte everything? What could Becky have done to break this trust? The more I deflected Becky’s questions, the more pointed and mischievous they got, and the more they scared me. And this is why, while I enjoyed Becky’s company far more than I enjoyed Charlotte’s, I found it exhausting. After a few hours of Becky, all I wanted was to collapse on Charlotte’s bed and let her take care of me.
The Stork Club Page 24
