Neurotica

by Sue Margolis

  Then, just after nine, as Anna was thinking about getting in the shower, she heard Dan, who had left with the children almost an hour earlier, calling to her from the hall and then come charging up the stairs. She just had time to hide the clothes under the duvet and whip an old emery board out of her dressing-gown pocket. As he came panting into the bedroom, Anna was sitting at her desk filing her nails.

  “Got halfway to the station and realized I'd forgotten my bloody briefcase,” Dan puffed. Barely looking at Anna, he bent down and picked up the ancient brown leather briefcase which was propping open the bedroom door.

  Until two weeks ago, Dan had never taken a briefcase to work. The only thing he ever carried was a notebook and a Psion, which fitted neatly into his jacket pockets. Up to that point, the briefcase, Dan's only surviving bar-mitzvah present, had been used as a filing cabinet. It was stuffed with insurance policies, bank statements and HP agreements for furniture they had thrown out five years ago. Floating around the bottom somewhere was the tiny plastic ring which had been used to push back what remained of Josh's foreskin after he had been circumcised, and which Anna was keeping in order to bring out at his wedding. Now these family ephemera were stuffed into a black bin bag down by the side of the wardrobe.

  Anna had no desire to find out what was in the briefcase. She had assumed it was nothing of any journalistic importance and guessed it contained another of Dan's medical contraptions—probably electronic paddles to jump-start his heart, complete with operating instructions. She figured he'd probably paid a fortune to have these translated into a dozen or so languages. His argument for this would have been that as there were so many tourists in London he had to be prepared in case it was a Xhosa tribesman who ended up spotting him in midinfarction.

  Anna's guess wasn't that far off the mark. The story of the briefcase contents had begun one afternoon as Dan was walking past Berry Pomeroy's desk at the Vanguard. Berry, who had been christened Barry but thought Berry had more élan, was the TV critic, and was renowned for never being about. The reason for this, which was nonchalantly acknowledged by everyone in the Vanguard building, was that he spent most of his time suffering from writer's block, which he could only relieve by going to the cans to masturbate.

  As usual, Berry was nowhere to be seen. On his desk was a pile of videocassettes, one of which caught Dan's eye. It was a preview copy of a BBC 2 documentary on spontaneous human combustion. He was unable to resist picking up the tape, and felt compelled to slip into the deputy editor's office, which happened to be empty and had a telly and a video. Dan watched the program four times and then immediately rushed out to Halfords.

  The reason he had got into such a terrible stew on the way to the station two weeks later was the sudden and frightful realization that he had left home without his handy-sized fire extinguisher.

  It wasn't just the certainty that Dan's hypochondria was spinning out of control like some mad, loose flywheel which had disturbed Anna. There was more to it. Something about his manner troubled her. The way, for example, he hadn't looked at her when he came into the bedroom to pick up the briefcase. There was no doubt in Anna's mind: Dan seemed even more distant and self-absorbed than usual. In fact, he'd been a bit strange all weekend. Whenever she had taken a break from one of her wild sexual fantasies about Charlie Kaplan, she had noticed that Dan, instead of slumping in his usual depressive state, had been positively agitated and jumpy, and kept getting up to check his office voice mail. He also had a faraway look on his face, and kept not hearing the children when they spoke to him. Anna had to repeat herself twice when she was explaining about the Mavis de Mornay job for the Globe, and that she might be very late home on Tuesday if the old bat didn't die on cue. Even after she had spelled it out again, she wasn't sure how much he had taken in. Finally, she had decided not to rely on Dan to baby-sit. She'd ask Denise to sleep over.

  Anna had suspected that Dan's agitation (actually caused by the sluggishness of the shrink he'd found in Time Out in returning his call—as well as the fear that he was going mad) was because he was waiting for the result of yet another test. That would explain the obsession with the phone messages. Nevertheless, it was odd he hadn't given the lab or whomever the home number.

  By Monday night he had seemed a little calmer. The call he was waiting for had obviously come. Anna was confident another electrical appliance would turn up on the kitchen table, but none appeared, and Dan continued to be hugely preoccupied.

  Standing in the shower after Dan had left with his briefcase, it occurred to Anna for the first time in donkey's years that this time he might be genuinely ill—dying even. Here she was about to commit adultery and her husband might only have months—or possibly weeks—to live. Guilt surged through Anna's veins the way anesthetic does before an operation.

  She spent the next few minutes repeatedly soaping her armpits and trying to remember the Jewish position on hell and whether it came with or without fire and brimstone. Just so as she'd know what to pack.

  After a while, the heat from the shower started to soothe Anna, and she began reminding herself how much Dan had neglected her, and how desperately she needed this fling with Charlie Kaplan. It didn't mean she had stopped loving or caring for Dan. If he was really ill this time, she would stop seeing Charlie, forget the idea of taking more lovers and doing the newspaper article and start investigating what was new in headstone designs. Her head clearer, but still agitated, Anna finally rinsed her crotch.

  She looked down at her pubes to check all the soap was off. The guilt of a few moments ago had nothing on the horror and anguish which were now following in its wake. Anna could not take her eyes off her pubic area. Overnight, possibly even in the space of the morning, Anna had sprouted not one, but at least seven or eight gray hairs. Long, straight ones. They hung there like straggly weeds in her beautifully tended bush.

  Anna accepted that decrepitude started to set in around the mid-to-late thirties. She just didn't want it to start setting in today.

  She couldn't comprehend her bad luck. How was it, she thought, that the one day out of three hundred and sixty-five she had set aside to be licked out by a virtual stranger turned out to be the selfsame buggering day nature chose to pop up with a quick reminder that she was, in fact, a crone in waiting, and that it might be worth taking a look at some of the brilliant half-price deals around on commodes?

  God help her, wasn't it bad enough that she would have to make sure she only made love to Charlie Kaplan on her back so that her breasts looked vaguely aesthetic and remained in the rough vicinity of her chest, instead of pointing perpendicularly downwards? Even if she remained dorsal, they were bound to make a beeline for her armpits. Why was it that at thirty-seven she had everything she had at twenty, only now it was lower?

  Anna knew the easiest thing to do was to leave the hairs be, and accept that at almost forty, a few distinguished-looking pubes was OK. But she couldn't. She had no intention of letting Charlie Kaplan behold any more of her impending crone-hood than was absolutely necessary. She also decided not to pluck them—a) because it would hurt, and b) because her mother had always taught her that if you plucked hairs, they would inevitably grow back thicker and stronger.

  It suddenly struck her that Clairol or someone might make a dye for coloring gray pubes. She quickly toweled herself off, put on joggers and a T-shirt and sprinted to Boots, which was only a couple of minutes down the hill in the George Street.

  Of course, there were umpteen dyes for coloring gray hair, but nothing for gray pubes, and she was damned if she was going to ask. Then she spied it, alongside a new range of shampoos and conditioners imported from Australia. Next to a conditioner for permed and colored hair, there was a box with a picture of an Aboriginal man on the front, carrying a long pole. There it was, written in huge letters across the top of the box: “Bush Magic—specially formulated to color gray in your most delicate area.” Anna thought the name was a bit feeble for the Aussies, who she would have expected to ha
ve gone for something like Minge Tinge, The Better Way to Color Your Cunt, but she was nevertheless beside herself at her sudden change of fortune. She paid the seven ninety-nine for a color called Kanga Rouge, which the leaflet inside promised was more chestnut than red, then walked out of the shop in the full knowledge that the cross-eyed seventeen-year-old boy assistant now knew she had gray pubes.

  Back home, Anna reentered the shower and shampooed in the dye, which, according to the instructions, needed to be left for an hour to ensure the color became permanent. Pushed for time—by now it was gone eleven—she decided to run the hair dryer over her pubes for ten minutes or so, hoping this would make the Bush Magic take faster. She turned the hair dryer to maximum heat and stood in the middle of the bedroom with her legs apart, looking as if she were about to deflower herself with a blast of hot air. After a while there was a slight smell of scorched pubic hair. But Anna didn't notice. She was feeling the anxiety creep over her again.

  Her head was filled with an amalgam of profound fear and self-reproach. She didn't know which was worse—the thought that she was about to commit adultery while her possibly terminally ill husband was sending off stamped addressed envelopes for hospice brochures, or the thought that Charlie Kaplan might decide he didn't fancy her after all once he saw her without her clothes.

  The anxiety persisted throughout the drive to the Park Royal. Stepping into the lift it had got much worse. Finally it took on a physical manifestation and the sweating and nausea had begun.

  Anna got up from the lavender stool and went over to the washbasin, which was shaped like an oyster shell. She rinsed her hands, wet with perspiration as they were, and took a small cotton hand towel from the pile next to the soap dish. As she dried her hands, Anna looked at herself in the mirror. Pendulous boobs and her graying bush aside, she had to admit she didn't look half bad. Rupert, he of Patrick and Rupert in South Molton Street, had cut her hair the day before so that it was now slightly longer than chin length. He had also put in some wonderfully subtle dark-blond streaks and given her a trendy side parting. Finally, he had used one of those little curling brushes to flick up the ends. When she pushed her hair behind her ears, which seemed to be the way everybody was wearing it just now, it showed off her high cheekbones and rather excellent jawline. Her elfin face with its huge gray-blue eyes was still a long way off Nora Batty droop.

  Anna took a couple of paces back from the mirror. The dress and coat hung beautifully and the blue was an almost perfect match for her eyes. More to the point, she was, at nearly forty, still wearing a size eight.

  She did a half-turn towards the mirror, flicked imaginary dandruff from the back of her shoulders and decided that if Charlie Kaplan turned out to be the kind of shallow, superficial git who couldn't see beyond a Pamela Anderson cleavage then that was his problem. She had no idea where this sudden surge of right-on thinking and self-assurance had sprung from, but for the time being, at least, she was feeling much better about herself. Even the guilt about cheating on her possibly dying husband was beginning to recede.

  Anna fiddled with her hair one last time. Then she took a deep, calming breath. A moment later she was dashing out of the powder room, almost knocking over the nice lady loo attendant, who was on the way back from her lunch break.

  Charlie, this really has to be one of the most magnificent views in London. You can see right into Kensington Palace and straight across the river to Battersea. Must be glorious at night.”

  Charlie trickled champagne into two glasses and carried them over towards Anna. She was standing with her back to him, gazing out of the enormous floor-to-ceiling window which ran the length of the living-room part of Charlie's hotel suite. She wondered whether he was normally this extravagant, or had taken the suite specially to impress her.

  “Anna, how's about we try and forget the view for a minute?” he laughed. “We've talked about nothing else since you arrived. Come on and have some of this. It'll calm you down.”

  Anna turned round looking a bit sheepish, as Charlie handed her a champagne flute. Then, in a very gentle voice, he said, “Look, if you're having second thoughts about being here, that's OK. Nothing needs to happen, not if you don't want it to.”

  Anna took a huge swig of the champagne. Then she looked at Charlie standing in front of her in his bare feet, faded Levis and white T-shirt. His hair was still slightly damp from the shower. This wasn't a man dressed for lunch at a five-star hotel. There was no doubt in Anna's mind about what he wanted to happen next, and it didn't involve smoked salmon parcels in a dill sauce.

  Once again Anna's body was experiencing the kind of glorious biochemical sexual responses around which Masters and Johnson could have based an entire symposium. She held Charlie's gaze in hers for a couple of seconds.

  “No, I've thought about it and I want it to. Honest.” Charlie's face was now inches from hers. She sensed he was about to kiss her, but instead of letting him, she allowed her nervousness to overtake her once more. She moved away, leaving him alone by the window, and began flitting around the room scrutinizing paintings and ornaments like an Antiques Road Show expert with St. Vitus's dance.

  Charlie made himself comfortable in a rose-pink velvet armchair with tassels round the bottom and watched her, smiling. She darted all over the room, picking up and examining department-store china figures usually associated with detached houses in Weybridge and peering closely at the bland central-purchasing-department hotel-room watercolors of Tuscan landscapes.

  After a minute or so, her eye seemed to be taken by a large and heavy reproduction mahogany desk. She walked over to it briskly, and ran her fingers over the green leather writing top. Then she started opening and closing the dinky drawers and pushed her fingers inside a couple of them as if she were looking for a hidden catch. Finally, muttering and tutting and looking perplexed, but determined—and still holding one of the Weybridge figurines of a crinolined lady carrying a spaniel and a nosegay—she got down on all fours, her hands caressing the carved wooden legs as she went. Then she crawled under the desk and disappeared.

  Charlie shifted off the chair, and sat himself cross-legged on the carpet like a rather sexy gnome, his head peeping into Anna's hideout.

  “Anna, please stop running away. You know it's all reproduction crap. I think you'll find there are no hidden compartments.”

  Realizing she had made a complete fool of herself, Anna scrambled out from under the desk. Charlie was already on his feet and offering a hand to help her up.

  “Sorry,” said Anna. “I guess I'm finding this adultery lark a bit scary after all.” Once again she was filled with the need to escape, or at the very least crack a joke.

  “My mother's house in Stanmore is full of this kind of repro stuff. She calls it her period furniture. More like menstruation furniture, if you ask me.”

  Charlie laughed but was beginning to get a bit cross.

  “Stop it. Stop trying to change the subject all the time. You haven't even given me the chance to tell you how absolutely gorgeous and stunning you look in that dress. . . . Anna, do you know you are one of the most beautiful, sexy and funny women I have ever met? I want to make love to you right now.”

  Anna resisted replying, no, you sing it and I'll hum along. Instead she said, “What do you mean, “one of'?” and this time she let him kiss her.

  As they kissed and Anna felt his arms around her, his erection against her, she experienced a luscious quivering deep inside her belly which she hadn't felt for years and had almost forgotten. Breathing in his warm body smell, which was a mixture of newly washed skin with a hint of fresh sweat and washing powder, all the fear and tension she had been feeling began to drain away. Her sexual energy, suppressed for ages living with Dan, was being unleashed with an almighty intensity that was taking her breath away.

  “Come on,” said Charlie after they had stopped kissing. “I'm taking you to bed.” The next moment, he was scooping her up into his arms like some medieval knight and carrying he
r towards the bedroom, ignoring Anna's mild protestations of fury.

  “Charlie, for Christ's sake, put me down. You can't cart me off like some bloody chattel. If anyone finds out, I'll be outed on the Guardian women's page.”

  In the bedroom, they kissed again, but more urgently this time. By now, both of them were breathing like raging buffaloes, and Anna suspected that she alone was giving off enough body heat to keep an average Inuit family going through a particularly chilly winter.

  As Charlie started to run his hands over her breasts and then down to her bottom, Anna could feel herself becoming more and more wet. Taking his time, he began to undress her. As he unzipped her dress and ran his tongue over the back of her neck, her head rolled forward and she began to wonder how much longer she would be able to remain upright. Then, almost as if he were reading her mind, Charlie pushed her gently backwards onto the bed, slipped down her bra straps and began biting and nipping her shoulders and the tops of her breasts.

  Finally, he unhooked her bra and her breasts spilled out and arranged themselves tidily on the front of her chest. He spent what felt like ages telling her how beautiful they were before he started kissing them and sucking her nipples.

  By now Anna's eyes were closed and she was moaning softly while Charlie concentrated on her breasts. After a few minutes he drew her towards him so that she was on her side, and she felt his fingers slide over her pants and penetrate slightly between her buttocks. She was now desperate for him to take off her pants and she let out another moan, but he ignored it. His response was to let her lie back on the bed and begin kissing her on the lips. With his tongue deep inside her mouth she felt his hand push the crotch of her pants to one side and his fingers brush past her bush, but barely touch her labia.