Promiscuous Unbound

by Bex Brian

  “They were going after the pouty look,” I said in my defense. “You could use some makeup, by the way. You look like shit. Even in my clothes.”

  “I deserve to,” she said, opening the drawer of my nightstand. “Have you got anything to eat?”

  “Just more apples and yogurt.”

  “Merde.”

  “What, didn’t my money buy you a decent meal?” I asked, watching her peel the skin off an apple with her teeth.

  She shrugged and ran her grubby fingers under her nose. “There was not much there.”

  “Well, least you found my clothes. Where’s the rest of them?”

  “Depends.”

  “On?”

  “If you need them.

  “What do you think?”

  Sonia said nothing.

  “How’s life out on the streets? Fun?”

  “I took a little trip.”

  “Really?”

  “With your money.”

  “Someplace nice?”

  “Lille.”

  “Why the fuck would you go to Lille?”

  “To see the husband.”

  I was baffled for a moment before I realized which husband she meant.

  “Oh my God. Why did you want to see him?”

  “I don’t know,” Sonia said, head bowed. “I had this crazy idea. It’s too silly.”

  “Which was?”

  “To make him feel sorry for me.”

  “And did he?”

  “No.”

  “Maybe he was too busy feeling sorry for himself.”

  “He was too drunk to feel anything.”

  “How did you find him anyway?” I asked.

  She blew her cheeks out and gave me a small smile. “It was not hard. I had seen the refugee’s file.”

  “Wow, I can’t believe you went there.”

  “You think it was a stupid thing to do, go all the way to Lille?”

  “No,” I said. “But why? Did you want to hurt him?”

  “Maybe. But I couldn’t have. I was so tired. The whole trip . . .” She got up and went to the window. “Do you know what happened when I finally went to his house?”

  “What?”

  “I asked if I could use his bathroom, and I fell asleep on the toilet.”

  “Did he know who you were?”

  “I told him I was a friend of his wife, but he didn’t seem to care. Only later, when I was about to leave, he asked me why I spoke perfect French. I guess he thought I was from his wife’s country.”

  “The guy couldn’t have been very observant.”

  “Well, men . . .”

  “So what happened after you fell asleep in the bathroom?” I asked.

  “I woke to him banging on the door. ‘You fucking asshole,’ I said first thing before I really knew where I was. I think he thought I was doing drugs because he shouted back through the door that next door lived a policeman. But I was still half-asleep, confused, so I said, ‘What do you think I am doing, stealing your fucking toilet paper? Then I opened the window and threw out all his toilet paper, plus his toothbrush.”

  “Was that a symbolic gesture?” I asked.

  “What?”

  “Don’t you remember that the refugee met him as he was handing out toothbrushes?”

  Sonia opened her mouth wide. She had forgotten.

  “It was then,” she continued, “that I realized he must be drunk because I heard his head crack against the door as he tried to put his ear up against it to hear me throwing his shit out the window. And his breathing was drunk. Sounded drunk.”

  “Heavy.”

  “That’s right. And thick.”

  “Then what?”

  ‘“Things quieted down. I thought maybe some of her things might still be in the bathroom, so I started looking at all the pill bottles along the shelf, and there was a cupboard too. But the only thing I saw that might be for a woman was this rubber bag with a tube coming out.”

  “A douche bag?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Or it could have been an enema bag.”

  Sonia made a face. “No makeup, no perfume. I was scared for a moment that I might be in the wrong house. So I made my voice very strong and I said, ‘Monsieur St-Cyr, where are your wife’s things?’ I heard a thump like he had sat down hard on the floor. ‘In a box,’ he said. That’s when I opened the door. . . .”

  Tears can be so surprising. They spring quick and fat, fulsome and unceasing. Sonia’s cheeks were wet through before her face had even crumpled. They left me a step behind, frozen in the wrong expression, thinking the wrong thoughts. I put a hand out, but she wanted more and gathered my whole arm against her.

  “Did he do something to you?” I asked after a time. She slapped my arm hard. I withdrew my hand. It felt hot and tainted.

  “I wanted to give it to him,” she said, gritting her teeth. “I opened the door and it bumped his head. It was like I kicked his mouth into action. He started blubbering, ‘It’s not my fault. It’s not my fault. It’s not my fault.’ I was so disgusted, and yet I wasn’t just going to leave. I needed some food, so I went to the kitchen and started to make myself a sandwich.”

  “And the husband?”

  “He got up and came in too,” she said, wiping away the last of her tears. “He watched me go through his fridge. His wife, he told me, went crazy very fast. The first night she arrived in Lille, he said, she went through every room and put everything that was on a table or on top of a dresser away into a drawer. When she was finished, she went back to the first room and stood in the middle, eyes closed, and told him what she had put away.”

  “That doesn’t seem so crazy,” I said.

  “Not so normal either. But it gets better.”

  “You mean worse.”

  “‘Winding down’—that’s how he described it. Just like a clock winding down. Most mornings he’d find her standing in front of her closet, naked, face blank, unable to choose something to put on. Whatever she picked up, she’d put down. She’d say she was going to make lunch, but he would go into the kitchen an hour later and nothing would have been prepared. That’s when I made him a sandwich, if you can believe that.” Sonia smiled. “Anyway, she finally just stopped altogether.”

  “Free will isn’t for everyone,” I said. “I read a story once about a man who had enough imagination to leave his wife, but not enough to live a new life. So after his escape he just went around the corner and lived there for thirty years.”

  “And?”

  “And they never once bumped into each other.”

  “Maybe that’s what the husband was thinking too, that she would never leave, that she would sit, blank, in his kitchen for the rest of his life. Then one day he came home and she wasn’t there. Shocked the shit out of him.”

  “I bet.”

  “But he was happy too.” Sonia shrugged. “That’s why he didn’t come after her right away. How she got all the way to Paris and to this place I have no idea.”

  Sonia pushed at my side. She wanted me to move over. As soon as her head hit the pillow she fell into a deep sleep, leaving me now wondering about the refugee’s life, leaving me to make it up. But from what point? I don’t think I’ll bother with the pre-refugee life. I’ve seen pictures of Pristina. A piss hole. Why not start where women are led to believe their lives begin: our weddings, that glorious day when we unionize. Her nuptials were pretty perfunctory. A military chaplain, skeptical but accommodating. The bride and groom in ill-fitting, borrowed clothes. Doubts swirling around the proceedings. It’s amazing more brides don’t go bonkers in the opening hours of marriage. I nearly did. I think that’s why most weddings have so many trappings. It’s an attempt to create as much diversion as possible, to delay the moment when you have to come face-to-face with your decision.

  Christ, Ralph and I were nearly strangers by the time we got married in London. Months and months we had been apart. I joked it was like an arranged marriage. Ralph had been off . . . where?
I should remember. It must have been someplace reasonably civilized. We spoke on the phone quite often. Or he spoke, as I hate more than anything the long-distance echo. I wonder if my own true love knows how many times I let him burble into the phone machine only because I didn’t want to subject myself to the reverberations of my own voice.

  I think now that getting married had become for me a private compulsion. Marriage is that, I believe: a compulsion. And once the decision has been made, whether right or wrong, good or bad, we have to sprint to the conclusion no matter what. By way of preparation, I wound and ground my way steadily, determinedly out of my old life, cleansing myself for the new. I wrapped things up with my father. Set to page his whole life, ignoring much of it, whole years in fact, in my impatience to be done by the fall. Lots of friends to say good-bye to, the sweet theatrics of momentarily rebuffing old lovers with worries of guilt over deeds about to be committed, aware all the time, from my high status as an engaged woman, of my true comfort with the hard-driving lovelessness of it all. As the time neared for me to head back to England, I made sure that I had a date every night. Some of them—good men who at one time or another might even have claimed they loved me—couldn’t help but notice the urgency with which I gobbled them up.

  There was no one to see me off that September morning. I don’t know why I minded. I have left thousands of places with no one sending me off. (Wonder if anyone went to see off the newly minted Mrs. St.-Cyr. Perhaps not. Bitterness all around, I’ll bet.) But that day was different. An anxious pall hung over me, and I found myself at 8 A.M. cozying up with that select band of early-morning drinkers at the airport bar. I didn’t expect to survive the trip.

  My book had been ecstatically received by my editor. (Her word, “ecstatic,” not mine.) The publishing house had big plans for it, and I was about to be married. Given all this, of course, I was convinced that the plane was going to go down. Mid-Atlantic my nerves got the better of me. Flight within flight? Hard to do. Even so I went charging to the back of the plane, hands shaking, eyes wild, and told the comely stewardess that I was pregnant, a better ploy to elicit attention than mere fear itself. For the rest of the trip I sat, quite happily, in the flight attendants’ galley, sipping a beer, listening to tales of birthing woes, foolishly thinking, “Yes, it’s possible that a dreamed future could be my future.”

  Ralph wasn’t at the airport to meet me. Definite pattern there. And at the flat, the kitchen sink was full of dishes. There was a note: “Poppet, clean sheets on the bed, have a nap. Helping out at the zoo for a few hours, shouldn’t be late.” In the bedroom, on top of the unmade bed, was a new set of sheets neatly folded. I had to laugh.

  It was near midnight when I heard Ralph come in. I didn’t move. His silhouette, framed by the kitchen light, appeared at the bedroom door. He paused a moment before coming forward. I raised the bedclothes, and he climbed in beside me. I should have stopped then, stopped the whole thing, I know that now. His frantic touch, his blind, deep-throated kisses, the uncharacteristic roughness with which he handled me, his every move was a prediction, no, an accusation of my future failure.

  Afterward, while he slept the sleep of the spent, I paced around the flat. I was looking for something—what, I don’t know. Evidence of Ralph’s life there, I suppose. In one closet I found a pair of his sneakers, still covered in jungle muck. On the desk, discarded boarding passes, odd numbers jotted down on the backs of envelopes or bits of paper, a ragged pile of dulled third-world coins. Among them was a shiny Canadian dime. It seemed incredibly small. I picked it up. It weighed next to nothing. I pulled open the bottom drawer of the wooden filing cabinet where the last of my father’s papers were stored. It occurred to me, as I stared at the contents, that all the papers were entirely work-related. Where, I wondered, were my father’s pictures, his letters? Why hadn’t I noticed this gap before? A thief, no doubt: one girl or another needing evidence to throw in my old man’s face. Must have found plenty. As for Ralph, I found nothing that night to incriminate him, which was, in its own way, disheartening. It meant to me that the inevitable betrayal, when it did come, would be well thought out, an undertaking of self-preservation. Boy, did I call that one.

  “Vivienne?”

  “Yes, Sonia?”

  “What time is it?”

  “It’s nearly dawn. You’ll have to get up soon.”

  “You smell weird.”

  “That’s because I was made up today by a professional makeup artist. Her final touch was to give me a dab of perfume. You know the French.”

  “Yes, I am one.”

  “I sometimes forget.”

  “Not me.”

  “No, I suppose not. I’m going to be in a magazine,” I whisper. “My whole story of woe.”

  “Yes.”

  “Hello. Hello magazine. And when it happens this time here will come to an end. I’m going to need some of my clothes.”

  “I’ve sold most.”

  “I thought you might have. I’ll need one outfit. Is there a skirt and a top left?”

  “That, yes. I am using the boots.”

  “Well, I hardly need them.”

  “There is one more thing I want to tell you.”

  “And that is?”

  “The husband, even after the sandwich, was still very drunk. He fell off his chair, passed out. I thought maybe I would rob him but that seemed stupid. But I wanted to do something to him so I unzipped his pants and looked at his penis.”

  “Did that make you feel better?”

  “No, worse.”

  Sonia, before she left last night, wanted to be reassured that even the worst marriages have their moments of profundity. Seems we all have marriage on the brain. “Everything’s profound, when you realize how hopeless it is,” I told her.

  Our marriage was conducted at the Marylebone registry office. Everyone, it seems, who doesn’t want the bother of a church wedding gets hitched there. I had to hold on tight to Ralph, who swayed, near swooned, throughout the ceremony. His suit was giving off dry-cleaning fumes. Perhaps they were making him high. I was high, practically squeaked “I will,” cried tears of joy and was truly surprised that the world still seemed the same when we burst out into the mid-morning light.

  By one o’clock the party was in full swing. The flat in Highgate rocked to boom-box tunes, the air spiced with curry from the Indian take-away feast Alastair and Lydia Lester, my father’s lover while we had been in Guatemala, had sprung for. Good stuff, which I hovered over, startled by an overwhelming sense of insecurity. Marriage wasn’t enough. I wanted more. Only by staying close to the tandoori chicken, by breathing the yeasty fragrance of lentil dal, could I manage to stop myself from begging Ralph, before all of our friends, to immolate himself in the fire of my love. Fat chance. It was then that Lydia Lester came up to me holding a package. “Come,” she said, leading us into the back office. I thought of how like her it was, not wanting to do something as impersonal as merely giving us wedding money, but with the state of mind I was in, I was impatient with her calm rectitude. She had loved my father. His absence was keenly felt. Still, I couldn’t bear to look at that fact head-on, not on this day. I didn’t want Lydia to close the door. I didn’t want her to take my hand. We sat silently for a long while, long enough for me to become aware of how drunk I was and to feel uncomfortable. Finally, I made a joke that she hadn’t missed out on anything by staying single because so far marriage was sort of boring.

  The violence, the sudden incredible violence with which she tore open the package, which up to that second had lain innocently on her lap, disguised as a wedding present, was so surprising I had no time to react. Out spilled photos and letters, notes, even a few charms. Lydia, her face flushed, began to frantically sort through some of the pictures. One by one she threw snaps of my father’s lovers on the desk.

  “Look,” she cried. “Look how beautiful. Each one radiating love. A conveyor belt of women at their peak, at their very best. Look, it’s the same smile, sh
y almost, all-knowing and all-giving. Interchangeable. Half, for Christ’s sake, are even in the exact same pose!”

  She was right. Before me were images of women in love. Lydia was there as well, her khaki pants cinched tight, leaning against a Land Rover, her smile open, her face pure.

  “No bloody ‘afterward’ pictures,” she fumed. “No, that, of course, is when we turn to words. More expressive, more chilling than a grainy photo of a lovelorn girl back in London, waiting for the number ten bus. Here”—she flung a few letters at my face—“the history of love lost written by those who know best. And guess what. We all sound the fucking same. ‘Just tell me that I gave you the best blow job, and I’ll know then that you loved me, even if only for a while.’ ‘Love is possible, Maurice, but you seem determined to fight it.’ Here’s a fine one. A girl with a sense of history—she writes, ‘Didn’t we have fun? Does that not count for something?’” Lydia didn’t even wait for me to attempt an answer. “No, it doesn’t count for anything, you stupid bitch. There is no anything! There never was. How, how could we have been so stupid?”

  “And this one,” she continued, “you’ll like this. This one is different—it’s the only one that mentions you. ‘I could be a good mother to your daughter.’” Lydia looked at me square on, as if to challenge me to guess the author. I gave her a slight shrug. “I wrote it,” she said, before breaking down into sobs. I tried gently to extract the letter from her, but she held on tight. I ended up merely patting her knee while she had her cry. Her bitter grief, her disappointments, clouded the room and made the party seem far, far away.

  Lydia, the constant. I could see that it killed her to blame me, but if not me, who? Besides, she was on a roll. When her tears started to subside and I made an almost imperceptible gesture to leave, she stood up tall and drew me to her breast.

  “What do you know of your mother?” she asked, poking at some of the pictures on the desk as if they were embers in a fire.

  “Not much. She’s dead. I do know that.”

  “Don’t you think it strange,” Lydia said, “that you have no brothers or sisters?”