It was my ex-husband who uncovered to me this most secret measure of the world. We were in bed, and he said, in the moment after he rolled himself off me, lying there beset already by gasps of laughter, that he wasn’t even sure if that one would count (the laughter starting mid-thrust – or, more precisely, at the completion or apex of a thrust, when he’d said, having suddenly ceased all movement, as if struck dumb, or religious, I think I’ve come.
You think . . .
I can’t tell. Can you tell?).
What do you mean, count? I said.
You know, he said, flopping the back of a hand onto my tummy. If it’ll count. In my running total.
That mystical number, he went on, when he saw I’d no idea what he was talking about, that I’ll be able to look back on, as I draw my last breath, and only ever wish it had been higher than it was.
I’ve no idea what you’re talking about.
It’s what people say, isn’t it? No one ever says, when they look back on their life, that they wish they’d had less sex.
Is that what they say, I said.
I don’t mean to seem flippant, or maudlin, but this is what I was thinking of, as I lay in my wide and comfy conference bed, in my well-appointed conference hotel, and thought of my friend and mentor Leonard Peters, asleep as he probably was – as I hoped he was: soundly, painlessly – in some other room of this hotel, in this other country of the world, hours away by plane from our native land.
And I conjured my ex-husband, as I sometimes do in times of stress, or insomnia, or self-pity, and I turned on one elbow to face him. What about this, then, I said. What about my feelings for this man, feelings of pity and – yes, perhaps – of regret? This man I respect, immensely, that I have spent most of my professional life actively and instinctively respecting, but who I declined to go to bed with when he asked – or not even asked, really, but merely obliquely indicated his wish to do so. Whom I turned down when he drunkenly – probably – courageously – probably – and regretfully – definitely – propositioned me, that one time. Which he never did again. He was most considerate about it.
And now, looking back, I think – and this is the maudlin bit – what would have been the harm, in the grander scheme of things, if I had said yes? No question but that I’ve said yes in instances I regretted – and sometimes regret to this day – far more than I would most likely have had cause to then, and instances too that were no less free of the taint of the workplace. I’ve failed to say no to worse men, men far inferior to him in character, and for all I know in bed too. And he was harmless, of that I’m sure. A fuck would have been a fuck. He’d divorced not long before, and was of an age of which I understand, now, the strange and desperate disorientation, and I was recently on the scene, and it was Christmas, and I think it just came over him, the animal need to pitch yourself forward, reach after something, steady yourself.
Work is the measure of all things – this is a belief of mine, perhaps even a maxim – and when you have sat across a boardroom table from someone in a departmental meeting for even five minutes there can be, there can surely be no surprises for you when you face them in the bedroom. Leonard was harmless – is harmless – and what harm can it have done to have slept with him that once? So that now, when he looks back on his life, he has one less regret. Or two fewer regrets; for, knowing him as I do, the regret that he never got to sleep with little old me would surely have been compounded by the second regret, following quick on its heels, and lasting far longer, that he had asked me at all.
So why ask me, you might say, blinking and widening your eyes in that way you do when I wake you up from wherever it is you sleep, when I think you back into existence.
Or, just as likely, you’d say, When was this? Was this when we were married?
You’ve turned onto your side, now, too, and so we lie facing each other, a foot of rumpled bed between us. We are mirrored, our heads propped on hands. You say it jokingly, camply, as if what you really want to say is, Was it because of me that you turned him down? Out of fidelity to our marriage? But you don’t say any of these things. What you say is, Why are you asking me this now? And I see that you’re serious, that you’ve seen through me, or through yourself, as conjured by me, and so I have to answer you.
This morning, during the coffee break before the second morning session – each coffee break a late Beckett play, one of the ones with diagrams instead of dialogue – I slipped away for a cigarette, as much to get some air on my face as for the thing itself, to rinse out my brain a little with traffic noise.
My smoking spot here, that a member of staff showed me on the first day, is a small courtyard down a dog-leg corridor from the suite of seminar rooms. Courtyard too grand a word. Poured concrete walls on three sides, with thick skeins of cables running along them and then disappearing around the corner, and, if you looked up, a single thin horizontal wire that trailed from it a creeper of some kind. It was only that, the green waterfall of toxic-looking leaves, and the off-set square of blue sky beyond the rising storeys, that told you where you were – or that you were somewhere even at all. At home I’m down to one cigarette a day, and have been since . . . well more or less since the divorce papers came through, thank you very much. I’m only really a smoker at conferences and the like, these days. It’s so much more useful a vice now that so few people do it.
This, time, however, I had barely taken that first deep, and deeply freighted, breath, before I heard the door open behind me, and a man came through it. Having, clearly, followed me.
‘Hi there,’ he said. ‘Mind if I join you?’
I had the elbow of my cigarette arm cupped in my other hand, and I waved the tip of the cigarette in as tight an ellipse as I could manage without seeming rude.
‘Nice spot,’ he said, and tamped a cigarette on his pack, as he looked up and around him. He looked at me to see if I was responding, was perhaps looking up, too, as if I hadn’t noticed how nice my spot was until I’d had it pointed out to me. I kept my eyes on him, though, and sucked on my cigarette. He seemed to take this on the chin; he nodded, tucked the pack back into his shirt pocket, and lit up, with a match from a book from the hotel bar. Perhaps he’d been driven to it, too. He had slicked-back unwashed hair with winding streaks of grey in it, the hair thick enough to swallow them whole and spit them out again, further back. Though the voice was American, he looked Greek, or something like it. Handsomeness part-way compressed by the great gentle fist of poor diet and age.
‘So you know Leonard how?’ he said.
‘Manchester,’ I said. I waited a moment, then went on. ‘Manchester, England? He was my PhD supervisor, and then I got a job there.’
He made a show of looking for my name badge, which I wasn’t wearing.
‘Eleanor Prose. Like the bad joke.’
‘Eleanor Prose. Right. No, no jokes at all.’
He seemed impressed, and asked about my keynote address – which I will be giving in something under twelve hours, now, as I lie here, facing you, thinking all this through, trying to find a way out through its far end – and I said something in reply about his paper, which he had given that morning and of which I retained more than I pretended to.
He smoked faster than me, and when he came to the end of his cigarette he brushed it down the wall to dislodge the burning tip, which fell, complete, like a scab from healed skin. It landed and lay on the floor like a dead insect, iridescent. He placed his shoe over it.
‘If Leonard could see me now. Shit. Makes me fucking hate myself.’
He shook his head, but this time when he looked at me my incomprehension must have shown. He gestured with the butt he still held. ‘Leonard,’ he said.
‘Leonard.’
‘You know, Leonard.’
He stopped – stopped speaking, stopped himself in the act of speech – then started again. ‘Leonard, you know . . .’
The point at which he realised he was going to have to tell me was also the point at which he no longer had to.
So much that is spoken in life is redundant. Verbal communication as an overlapping and repetitive series of superfluities. White noise, chatter, birdsong. A doily all cutwork and no mat.
Leonard had lung cancer.
Leonard had lung cancer and he was dying of it. Everybody knew it. How could I not know? How did he, how could that be? It was far gone, my new Greek-looking friend told me, beyond all beyonds, and everybody knew. The fact that everybody knew was clear from his shock at the fact that I didn’t. Everybody there, at the conference, everyone but me. The other speakers, my peers, friends and colleagues that would sit facing me the following afternoon – the coming afternoon, now – in the main lecture theatre, when I spoke to them about Leonard, his career and his work: they all knew. The early career academics from Bangkok and Sao Paolo: they knew. The grad students from the host university, smart and crisp as new-baked macaroons in their conference clothes, that stood aside at the coffee table, at my approach: they knew. That they withdrew and conversed in whispers when I approached was not because of me, my books and ideas and the fact of my presence, here in a hotel in their city, pumping thin black coffee from a vacuum flask along the trestle table from them, but because of me, how I could walk around like this oblivious when Leonard was dying of cancer, dying, as good as dead.
I had been intending, for the second morning session, to sit in on a seminar featuring my old friend and colleague Derek Boener, also once of Manchester, but I didn’t. Instead I went to listen to a fringe panel that Leonard was chairing. So like him, to rock up to his celebratory conference, his Festschrift, the pinnacle of his career, a lovingly constructed peak from which he could survey the forest that has sprung up around the globe, all grown from seeds carried on the four winds from his originating tree, and instead of listening to us all sound off grandly about how important it all was, he’d head up a panel of grad students from Bupkiss, Ohio, or Dubrovnik or wherever, who are actually taking his ideas and doing something with them. Not leaving them in any decent state in the process, it has to said, but that’s Leonard for you. And grad students. I slunk into the back row, to sit with the other no-goodniks, slid my tablet onto my lap as cover, and watched him. His ease at the table, leaning first to his left then his right, pouring glasses of water for the presenters, one of whom was actually visibly shaking with nerves. Taking off his watch and placing it, in that classic trope of academia, on the table in front of him. A combination of gaucheness and verve that would have been disarming, if I hadn’t already been thoroughly, comprehensively disarmed, dismembered, irradiated.
The first presenter, the nervy one, stood up, went to the computer and opened her slideshow. The sheaf of papers in her hands, as she faced us, shivered, a constant, delicate movement. I thought of my father sifting flour in the kitchen. Mid-twenties, smartly turned out, she could have been me, twenty years ago. I’d puked in the loos ten minutes before I gave my first conference paper. That’s still the taste of academia, to me, the acid bite of reflux. She wasn’t shaking from nerves, the girl, she had a condition, multiple sclerosis or somesuch. I slipped a pill of chewing gum into my mouth, fervently wishing it were cyanide, and rested a hand like a visor over my eyes to watch. She talked, and people listened, sure enough, but the rushing in my ears was easily enough to drown out any words.
Instead, I watched him. What I was looking for, I don’t know.
I do know. I was looking for the mark of death. Such a thing must exist. In the realm of the cancerous, at least. My auntie Evelyn died of cancer of the stomach, and you could see it in her from half a mile away. She, too, was prone to vomiting, the confused response of the body to something inside it, that it wanted to get outside, and that it thought it could simply wash out with the rest of the garbage. There was no mark on Leonard, though, that I could disentangle from the general marks of age, which is nothing more than death smudging you with its thumb, smearing your features, letting you know you’re not forgotten, you haven’t been passed over. Christ, listen to me.
I’m listening.
When the session ended I headed out quickly to the foyer to ambush Derek, positioning myself by some fabric-covered display boards with A4 sheets tacked on them. He was practically the last person out of his room, swept out on a wave of admirers, all flagrantly nodding and smiling and listening and talking as they manoeuvred themselves around him, never quite jostling, never quite flinging him to the floor and ripping the flesh from his skeleton.
I reached in and pulled him out by the sleeve, firing a barely human grin at the nearest hanger-on, and marched him over to the window.
‘Did you know?’ I said, practically hissing out the question.
Of course he knew.
How was it that I didn’t know, was the real question. Had I been under a rock for the last twelve months? The information had been disseminated sensitively, but rationally. Someone must have told me. Probably Leonard did himself. (Could it have ended up in spam?) Or had I simply not processed the information, let it pass undigested through my system?
‘Look,’ he said. ‘We’re going for lunch. Come along.’ He nodded to where Leonard was coming into the foyer, with his own coterie – did they know? Surely they knew – but then how could they even talk to him if they did?
I backed away, giving another smile that this time was surely no more than a flinch, and slipped myself into the general exodus. Flinch. Such a beautiful word.
‘You alright?’ someone said. It was my American friend, walking at my side.
He took out his packet of cigarettes and nodded towards the door. Then, when I shook my head, asked if I wanted to go and get a bite to eat.
Why does everyone want to go for lunch? What does it signify, lunch? Does it even have a point? Stand facing the wall and eat a sandwich. Eat a burger or a kebab if you must. Eat a cigarette. Lunch is just a question of what you want to end up smelling of afterwards, and as such – yes, I know it’s your line – rather like sex.
I went back to my room, where I’m lying now, and lay on my bed and stared at the ceiling. Alone with my thoughts. Those interlopers.
Well, you say, as we stare at each other, here in the dark, with only the small, incidental sounds of a hotel room to accompany us. Little noises, like creatures, like insects that you are quite happy to share the space with. What do you want me to say, you say. That you’re a heartless bitch with sociopathic tendencies? All that ‘I don’t do networking, I don’t do chit-chat, life’s too short’ bollocks: that it’s just a cloak for an innate lack of sympathy? Or not a lack, an incapacity. Is that what you want to hear?
It’s nothing I wouldn’t have heard from you before, I think. In which case – I know, I know – what’s the point in conjuring you here in the first place? If I’m just going to put old words in your mouth, what’s the point?
Well, that’s your call, you say. I mean, if I came out and said: that’s all a lie, it’s not you, not really. Would you even believe me? If I said that your manner, that people take as frosty, or disdainful, or even repellent – I’m exaggerating, no one’s ever told me they think you’re repellent, not in so many words – if I said that wasn’t who you are; at heart you’re a sweetie, and can be discovered as such, and considered as such, so long as no one treats you as such. If I said all that, you wouldn’t believe me, would you?
No, I say. No I wouldn’t.
I spent the afternoon in one of the few sessions conducted in the native language of our hosts. Which I don’t speak. But which is, I had thought, and now had confirmed for me, enchanting to listen to. The delightful play of intonation, rising and falling as if according to some foreign tide, with only the odd imported Anglicism to make one wish oneself entirely deaf.
In the evening there was a formal do, organised and official, and I decided I had to go. It w
as that or pack my bags, write an email of abject, career-scuttling apology, and leave. It was in a hall over in the old part of the university, cool stone walls and the floor a stunning pattern of tiles, blue, white and yellow, almost sickeningly regular, like fractals.
Catering staff, the click of heels on tiles, drinks on trays, and a small music ensemble tuning up in the corner, bending their heads over their instruments like wise old birds, a quartet made up of various former colleagues of Leonard’s. A tribute, a surprise, they would be playing a mixture of folk and classical and whatever the music was they played here, in this country. The kind of thing you can improvise well enough, if you have half an ear, and know the ground rules. Though no doubt at least one of the serving staff would be dying inside with each lumpen stab and phrase. It’s funny, this might be the culmination of an academic career, the Festchrift conference, but where it takes place will be quite random, usually taking over an annual conference like a cuckoo’s egg in a warbler’s nest. A friend of my father’s was a cricketer, and I remember being dragged along to his testimonial, a farewell match from his club, with the meagre takings going to him, to help him on the way in his life beyond the crease. But then sportsmen and women’s careers end so soon, whereas academics’ just go on and on.
But do they? What actual proper work has Leonard done in the last twenty years? What, for that matter, have I done, in the last five? What will I do in the next twenty, until such a time that I stand there, like Leonard, glass in hand, soaking up the general admiration and love, as if that were some kind of consolation for the approach – for the onset – of death?
We speak of admiration, respect, friendship. But if the expression of that admiration takes the form of the sexual, who’s to say that’s not appropriate? The sexual gift speaks something that just cannot be said by keynote address, nor by sincere words spoken with rented glass of sparkling wine in hand. Think of the sexual gesture in a relationship, in a marriage – think of its manifold ends and uses.
Best British Short Stories 2015 Page 6
