by Anne Enright
He is saving for college. And I know that I will lose him, when he goes. So I am on the strictest possible diet, and I am talking non-stop to Natalie about the Dress; the one that I will wear to the debs dance. I mean, I know he loves me, but I will wear this dress and my boyfriend will take one look at me and he will realise that this is what he will lose. All this.
Billy has been accepted into two colleges in England, but I don’t think they have the money really, and with his mother still in remission he wants to stay close to home. September is Billy and Natalie’s first anniversary, and it is also the anniversary of his mother’s diagnosis, and it is the month of our last dance, before the boys go off to war. But I feel so grateful for the turn of the leaves, somehow. I walk through the woods and remember where we nearly did it one time, my boyfriend and me, and I think – a bit like Billy’s mother – that when we go, we will go down swinging.
I’m texting Natalie one day and she idly mentions that she has her dress already. ‘White! white! white!’ And it takes me about two years to spell out, ‘very Renee Zellweger!!!’
Eventually I have to bring my little sister into town with me – which feels like a sad-bastard thing to do, but actually she’s a demon when it comes to clothes, it’s like bringing the entire line-up of a girl band. Between us, we solve everything with a sub-Westwood, sub-goth bustier and my mother’s long silk skirt, and a gorgeous second-hand – or should I say vintage – lamé shawl.
Billy’s mother says we should go over to their house before the dance so she can frisk us down for naggins of whiskey, and besides, she says, she wants to see me in all my finery. And I say, ‘Mrs Casey, I can’t even take the smell of whiskey, vodka’s the only way to go.’
So when Natalie rings, I ask her to bring her hair straightener and she says, ‘Like, it’s sort of large.’
‘Not to the hotel,’ I say. ‘Just over to Billy’s before we go.’
‘Uh … OK,’ she says, like ‘whatever’. So I arrive at Billy’s with everything in a huge bag, and Billy’s father answers the door.
I don’t know where I got it from, this idea that we were going to do it all there: the fake tan and the fake eyelashes and the bow-ties and the zips. When I text Natalie, she just comes back with ‘???!!?’ and Billy’s da looks a bit embarrassed, because not even Billy is home. He shows me upstairs into his own bedroom, which is a funny place to be, and I sit at Billy’s mother’s dressing table, which is a sort of alcove in the fitted wardrobe, and I look at Billy’s mother’s stuff: lipsticks gone off and pressed powder with one of those pads that look sort of orthopaedic, and industrial-strength night cream. And I know I have to skip the tan for a start, there’s no one to do my back. I get a really glossy face on and then I just sit there, looking at myself in Mrs Casey’s mirror. After a while there’s nothing for it except put on the damn dress. Then I sit on Mr and Mrs Casey’s bed, and look at the wallpaper. The bed isn’t made. The sheets are a really dark green. I lie down for a moment – just for two seconds, I lie down. Then suddenly everyone’s arriving, so I jump up and stuff all the gear into my bag, and I make my grand entrance, sweeping down the stairs and into the hall.
Natalie jigs up and down and screams, and she hugs me from four feet away, not to muss. Then we go into Billy’s front room, and his father takes a picture, and then she’s there – Mrs Casey. I was wondering what the silence in the house was, but there she is, flattened against the wall. Actually she swings in round the door frame like a broken gate. She holds the door frame with one hand and slams the other one flat against the wall. Then she goes rigid, and looks to the left, as if there’s someone after her, and they’re in the hall.
‘Hi, Mrs Casey,’ I say.
She’s really drunk.
‘Hiiiii,’ she says.
‘What do you think?’ I do a pathetic little twirl and she lowers her head at me and gives a sort of grunt of approval, then she swings her head around to find Natalie.
She looks at the dress.
‘Hnnnn,’ she says – which is, actually, the way it comes out of her, quite a friendly and ironic sound. It’s a ‘White? Interesting choice!’ sort of sound, but Natalie just looks at her.
Then she picks up her white skirt with her Rouge Noir nails and ‘Billy!’ she says, like he’s a dog or something. She doesn’t look to the left or the right. She puts that nun’s smile on her face, walks past Mrs Casey and keeps walking until she is out the front door.
‘People die,’ that’s what Natalie said to me on the phone. Because of course, we had a big surge when we got to the hotel and the boys got really trashed. At least, I got really trashed so I assume the boys did too, and I ended up snogging – not Billy, thank Christ – but someone else altogether. There’s a little splash of puke on the back of my mother’s silk skirt, and I’m pretty sure the guy got sick over my shoulder, and Natalie must hear it in my voice on the phone, the way I blame her for all this. Because when she picked up her white skirt and walked past Mrs Casey, something broke. Something between the four of us broke, for good.
‘And anyway she’s not dying,’ says Natalie, who has no intention of dying, ever. ‘She was just drunk.’ Which is true.
Like we weren’t drunk?
Which I don’t think of saying, at the time. I think of saying it later, though – in the middle of the night, when I’ve just woken up in a sweat of pure shame. Apart from anything else, it’s so gay – this trailer fantasy I had of me and Natalie swapping mascara, and spraying each other’s hair, and fixing the boys’ ties. Mrs Casey, downstairs, being tough and smart about my dress; giving me a tough, smart kiss on the cheek before we go. And it’s a while before I realise that a) it isn’t hairspray that makes you gay, it’s sex that makes you gay, and b) I don’t even like hairspray.
So that’s all right, then.
For a while I just lie there and let all the little moments fly round in my head. Like months ago in the chipper, when Natalie said, ‘There’s not much point getting in a fizz.’
And I think that Billy’s mother will live or die whether or not we get in a fizz. So I say, fizz away. You might as well play it as it feels, Natalie.
My sister’s night light thinks about shifting from blue to lilac, and then seems to change its mind. What do I tell her – precocious brat that she is – what do I tell her, at the age of twelve and a half?
We are not connected.
Because this is what Natalie is saying, isn’t it? That we are alone. That there is no connection between me and her, or between Billy and me, or between any of us and Mrs Casey, who might live or who might actually die. Between human beings.
And of course she isn’t saying this at all.
I mean, I will still hang out with Natalie. And I know I’ll get to like her in some different way – probably her way, actually. And I know the thing I have for my boyfriend isn’t love, it’s just a stupid kind of bliss. I know all these things – they’re not what woke me up. What woke me was a feeling like a horror film – except really boring.
It was the sheets. When I lay down, just for a second, on Mr and Mrs Casey’s moss-green sheets. Before the dance, when I was all dolled up in my silk skirt, and I pushed my hands along them and put my cheek against the dark cotton, just for a second. It was the smell of those sheets – cool, unwashed; like something I really wanted, going stale.
That is what woke me up.
HERE’S TO LOVE
I am thirty-nine. My friends tell me that their wives are not happy. My male friends, that is – old boyfriends, some of them. I meet them when I go back home, or they look me up when they come through Paris. It is that time of our lives: they ring, ‘Hello, stranger,’ and we meet for coffee and we catch up on old gossip and new babies and jobs and, late in the conversation, or the next evening when we meet for a quick drink, they tell me that their wives are not happy.
I don’t know what I am supposed to do about it.
I ask how they are and they say that they’re fine, and they
might say it in a melancholy sort of way, but mostly I believe them – that they are content, or trying to be content. They work, and love their children, and they are interested in something like hiking or a new house – a second house: they like having this house and being in it at weekends.
‘And how is Maria?’ I say or Annie, or Joyce.
‘Oh. She’s up and down.’
This from my friend Shay, who I hadn’t seen in seven years, and love so much, and not just him, but a little show-off called Peter, whose wife deserves to be miserable, and a guy called Tommy – this odd, impossible boyfriend I had once, who ended up in God knows what sort of nuptial bliss with four ‘fantastic’ kids: even Tommy at the mention of his wife’s name looks vague, as though he can’t remember exactly what she is supposed to be doing with her life just now.
I do feel burdened by it, a little; by the great unhappiness of my male friends’ wives. Even Shay’s wife, Marie, who I never really liked at the time. I do feel burdened by the heigh-ho sadness of his love for her. And I wonder, in a way, why he wants to tell me.
It is easier to say these things to someone you don’t see every day, of course. And I never had children, which makes me a kind of throwback – I am still ‘fun’. I am still the way we used to be.
Well, yes. Though sometimes I also feel my life closing down. My husband is old, and that makes me feel old too, from time to time. He is not rich. He did not leave his wife – his wife died, some years ago. My husband survived terrible historical events, and then he found me.
‘So how are you?’ says Shay. ‘How the hell are you?’ looking me up and down – looking mostly at my breasts, bless him.
‘Good, thanks. Really good.’
Actually, they are usually men I have slept with, these guys from home, the ones with the sad wives. If the truth be told. But that isn’t the important thing about them. I never did get very fussed about sex. It was all the other stuff that did my head in.
‘You’re looking well,’ he says, by which he means I haven’t got fat, or distracted. I am still poised, or I try to be, as I sit at the little table, and engage the waiter in a lot of chat about whether and when we will eat.
Shay looks at me while I do this. He likes it in a way that I find disturbing and nice. He is proud of my expertise. And he heaves a nostalgic sigh when I light a cigarette – the Irish don’t smoke any more – I see his fingertips itch towards the pack.
‘Sláinte.’
‘Cheers.’
It doesn’t matter to my husband, this social self; he doesn’t care that I am Irish in an old-fashioned way, with a new lick of French. My Agnès B cardigan, and my vaguely hick Hermès scarf: these are certainly not the things that make me beautiful to him. Sometimes I would like to be understood by him, in a venal sort of way, but mostly I am content. I do not know why my husband chose to love me, but I know that, for both of us, it is a great romance.
‘Good to see you.’
‘So good to see you!’
‘So how are you?’ says Shay. ‘What gives?’
It is lovely to see Shay. We went to the same college in Dublin, but I know him mostly from working together in London. We had this great expat thing going for a while, drinking huge amounts on Friday evenings – probably to stop us ending up in bed together. Not that it worked every time. It all feels like another life now, but there he is, just as big as himself.
‘Oh, you know, nothing much.’
What can I say? My husband is sixty-three. He has no job. He is from Saigon. I know exactly what he is thinking when I look into his eyes. He never repeats himself. He told me once what he had witnessed – he told me over the course of one long night, in my old apartment in the Marais, and even now I think of that night as you might think of a dream.
He has a young mouth. I could say that.
My husband’s mouth is tight and soft as an opening bud. He is careful in his sexual pleasures. He likes to look at me as I walk around the room. His touch is always specific, and chosen, and light. When he makes love to me, there is very little hesitation. And though we do not make love as much as we used to, it is always ‘successful’ as these things go.
This is what I would like to tell Shay, because I feel accused – of course I do – of making some deal with desire; some compromise. But my life took an unexpected turn and now I think unexpected thoughts. I think, for example, that many couples are happy in bed – strange, mismatched couples that you see on the metro; ugly ones too. What a great secret! And I wonder if sexual unease – this modern malaise – I wonder if this is not the big lie. I would say that it is the big capitalist lie, but these words make my husband close his eyes, and fail to open them for a long time.
The man with his eyes closed is called Le Quang Hoa.
There are marks on his body. Sometimes he flinches away from things – dogs, of course, and sudden shadows, but also things that I cannot understand: the sound of ice in his glass of water will cause him to flicker, and, for the smallest moment, shut down. I am alert to these signs. I do not look for them, or fear them, but I do recognise them, and I get up and take the glass out of his hand. That is all. He does not need me to do this. He lived alone in Paris for many years, before he met me.
But I take the glass away and I set it down. I wonder what that clinking sound does to his head. And when we make love, I am rarely inventive: I do not exult, or cause pain. I do not take the ice out of the bedside glass, for example, and run it down his spine.
This is what happens when love intersects with history. This is the distance you keep. Or it is the distance the Vietnamese keep. Or old men. Or it is the way my husband and I think about distance and tenderness – it is just the way we are. Who knows? We will have no children. We are very happy. Or, no. We are not happy, exactly. But we love each other very much, and this charges our lives with shape and light.
For the last few years we have lived off the rue Mouffetard. Every morning, when I go to work, my husband walks around to the municipal pool with his towel rolled under his arm. I think of him in the modern, blue water, swimming without a splash. He is like the old ladies you see on the French coast, who paddle out in their sunglasses and hairdos, and paddle back again, gossiping, like so many bodiless heads.
Shay gives in and lunges for the packet of Marlboro Lights. He fusses one to his mouth, and groans, long and deep. Then, when he has fully repented, he lights the match.
‘Tastes fucking awful,’ he says.
‘Well, don’t.’
But he doesn’t stop. And now that the evening is unleashed, I ask him about his wife.
‘How’s Maria?’
‘Oh. She’s up and down,’ he says.
‘Right.’
Because ‘up and down’ is Irish for anything at all – from crying into the dishes to full-blown psychosis. Though, now that I think about it, a psychotic is more usually ‘not quite herself’.
‘I don’t know,’ he says. ‘The moving around doesn’t help. We went up to Epsom, to head office, and they talked about – well, they talked about me going to Germany actually, but I didn’t think she’d be able for it. It was a tough one to turn down. Of course, the kids were just getting settled too, in their schools.’
I roll the ash off the top of my cigarette and keep nodding. I do love Shay. He has always had a large, and broken, heart. He is the kind of guy who would turn his pockets out in the street, to show he had nothing left to give. And here he is again, flinging his poor soul on to a café table for me; throwing it down – this old rag – because it is all he has.
‘I know it’s my fault. Or it’s the job’s fault. But I still love her, you know.’
‘Well of course you do.’
‘She wants to get back to her singing.’
‘Oh? Right.’
‘Well, that’s what she was doing before.’
Was it? I remember Maria – a tiny, pretty woman – we met once and she hated me, on sight. She was very keen to tell me how she traine
d as a gymnast, as I recall, but I don’t remember any singing. I’m sure Shay is right. I am sure she is a singer. I am sure she is a famous singer disguised as a wife, and that it is all Shay’s fault for thwarting her, and shrinking her life. I remember their wedding – her compact little waist under his baggy hand. I think about her doing back flips at the age of nine.
‘She’s really good,’ he says. ‘She’s brilliant. But it’s not something you can just –’
And he lets the sentence drop.
It is five minutes to six. Back in the apartment, my husband has cooked, and decanted, and cooked up again, a beef broth for noodle soup. He won’t wait for me to come home. He will pour it, quite soon, and slurp it down. After which, if I am still not back, he will switch on the TV. He likes science fiction: he is especially fond of Xena: Warrior Princess. If there is none of this stuff to watch, he will sit and read from a selection of medical books he has, also quack medical books; pausing occasionally to push at a spot on his abdomen, or to flex and examine his toes.
Five streets away, I touch the back of Shay’s big hand and say, ‘It’s what happens.’
Shay looks at my fingertips, lying there. Then he lifts his large head and looks at me, like, What would I know about it? What would I know about ‘what happens’?
‘That feeling that you’re running out of road. It just hits women quicker. I mean, when they have kids, it hits them. That’s all. When they have kids.’
‘The thing I like about you,’ says Shay, ‘is you tell it like it is. “You get old, you get fat, it all turns to shit, you die.”’
‘Yeah well.’
So now it is my fault – the fact that Shay’s wife will never get on the radio, to croon her bedsit jazz. I am the one who is standing in her way.
‘It’s a very particular thing,’ he says. ‘Someone else’s dreams. It’s not something you can control.’
