by Edna O'Brien
I dreamed of you before I met you. That was rash. I dream of you still, quite unedifying dreams where you are embracing me and whispering and we are interrupted the way we are constantly interrupted in life. You once told me that there were only ten minutes left for us because you had to buy a piece of perspex for a painting, make sure of getting it before the shops closed. The painting was a present to you both. It must have been in lieu of a wedding present.
Yes, I believe you are afraid of her. You say it’s pity that holds you. But I believe that you are afraid of her and don’t know it, and I believe that you love her and don’t know it. You don’t know very much about yourself, you shirk that. I asked you once, I went down on my knees, I asked you to go away for three days, without her or me or anyone, and you looked at me as if I were sending you to Van Diemen’s Land.
And another thing, you told me the same stories, the same escapades. You seem to forget that you have already told me that story when you broke bottles of champagne, stole them, and then broke them. In your youth. And how you pity chambermaids, make the bed with them, that is to say, help them with the tuckings. Another virtue of yours is that you never flirt. You don’t trade on your good looks, and really you deserve a beautiful young girl. I don’t think you are in your right mind. Neither am I. We should never have met. I do believe it’s a tribal thing. When I saw your daughter I thought it was me. No, not quite. I thought, or rather I knew, I was once her. She looked at me like a familiar. That gaze. She didn’t make strange. I touched her all over. I had to touch her. I had to tickle her, her toes, her soft knees (like blancmange she was), her little crevices, and she smiled up at me and you said, “Smile for your auntie,” and I was glad you called me Auntie, it was so ordinary and so plain and put me on the same footing as you.
Couldn’t we all live together, couldn’t we try? I used to be so jealous, green with it, as they say, eaten up. I still am, but couldn’t we ride that way, the way the waves, the white horses, ride the sea? When I said it to you, the mere suggestion made you panic, which makes me realize, of course, that you are not able for it, you are not up to it, you are only able for lies, you are only able for deceit.
So one day you will disappear forever. Maybe you have. Isn’t there some way of letting me know? I had so many wishes concerning us, but I had one in particular, the smallest most harmless one, and it was this: that one day I would come in from the outside and you would be here, already waiting for me, quite at home, maybe the kettle on or a drink poured. Not an outlandish wish. I suppose you wouldn’t have wanted to make the journey without the certainty of seeing me. You said that coming up the street you always wondered what I would look like and what I would be wearing. I wear brown now. I suppose it’s to be somber.
After your baby smiled you put her on the swivel chair and I watched her and you watched me, and your friend, whom you’d brought as a safety measure, was watching you watching me, and the baby watched over us all. It was a perfect moment. I know that. None of us wanted it to end. Your friend knew. He knew how much I loved you and maybe he knew how much you loved me, but neither you nor I knew it because we didn’t dare to and possibly never will.
Possibly and perhaps—your two favorite words. Damn it. You see, I had just got used to the possibility of nobody, a barren life, when you came along. Of course you don’t believe that; you think with all my frocks and my bracelets and my platform shoes that I am always gallivanting. The truth is, I used to. I have collected those garments over the years and that parasol you saw was given to me once on my way to a bullfight. About a year ago—I stopped gallivanting. It is not that I want to be good, no. If anything, I want to be bad, because I would like it to end without its being too sickly. Endings are hideous. Take flowers, for instance; some go putrid, the very sweetest smelling of all go putrid—so does parsley. I would like it just to shrivel away. It mustn’t, though.
The strangest thing is, he lost his parents too at a young age. My father, that is. You see, I am mixing you up with everyone, my father, my mother, my former husband, myself. Could you not come, could you not contact me now, so I could tell you about them, their customs and their ways? The whole parish I know. The lady called Josie walking out for three evenings with a man and saying, “I have no story to tell,” meaning was he going to propose to her, and next day he sent for a tray of engagement rings. He must have done it out of fright. Later she went mad. People depend on each other so much. Too much. You listen to me all right, in fact you repeat things that I say. My thoughts are like sprouts, like sprouts on the branch of your brain. Why are you so cold, so silent? Your element is mercury.
All sorts of things remind me of you. On a dump today I saw a remains of a gas cooker and a Christmas tree, though we’re bang in the middle of the year. Christmas. That will rankle. You will celebrate it with your family as you did last year. Well anyhow, it looked pathetic, out in the rain—a small gas oven and a Christmas tree with a stump of day around it. I stood and looked at it. I had a feeling that you might come around the corner, swiftly, the way you do. We would not have needed to say anything, you would have understood. That is the worst thing, that at times you understand.
We were seen twice in public. I hated you buying me drinks, but you refused to allow me to. I wanted to slip you a note but couldn’t As a matter of fact, I lost all my confidence and quite a few of my movements. I was ashamed to remove my coat, even though I was sweating. I thought it would make me seem too much at home, and after all, I had asked you there and you hadn’t wanted to come, you had resisted even to the extent that you couldn’t think of the name of a pub despite the fact that it was your district, and what I had to do was go there and prowl around and find a quiet one and ring you. You allowed me to ring because she was away, staying with her sister. Her sister is an invalid. You seemed to imply that she had harmed herself. Are they a hysterical family, are they musical? Shall we call her Bimba? I can’t use her name, that would be too friendly. I dream of her death, in her sleep, in an airplane crash. Anyhow, in the pub you made me promise, take an oath, that I would never ring again. I took an oath. Is that commendable? I was thinking of you even as I sat there and promised; I was thinking of you, in another state altogether, a former state, a state of grace, a you saying, “I’ll always come back to you, always, there’s nothing else,” and I was thinking of the expression attached to that time, the sad eyes and so forth. Your eyes pierce people. You may say it again with your sad true eyes. Anything may happen, anything.
Anyhow, to get back to my father and yours. There are resemblances and there are differences. Yours loved his wife and died soon after her, to rejoin her in the next world. You felt left out maybe, excluded as a child. In the middle of a family, neither the youngest nor the oldest. My father’s parents also died within a short space of one another. Pneumonia. Wintertime and snow at the funeral and snow falling in on the coffin, and then the four children divided up among cousins; the method of division was that each child was told to choose which pony and trap it wanted to be in, and in so doing choose its future home. Not a scrap of love had he. Once when he was sick he hid in the harness room, and when he was found, the woman of the house gave him a good thrashing and then a laxative. Not a scrap of love had he.
Maybe you’re like him somewhere in the center of you, maybe you’re alike. No, you’re not. You’re as unalike as chalk and cheese. You have nature. He lacks it. Not many people have nature. And not many people have gentleness. Take my next-door neighbors, they shout and go around in dressing gowns, and as their friends arrive they shout even louder, and the hostess puts on a horrible red raincoat when she wants to go and get something from her car and it happens to be raining. I have a dreadful feeling that she’s trying to impress me with her shouting and her car and her rainwear.
It’s teeming today. Wouldn’t you know. I have a feeling, a very definite feeling that it might not cease, might turn into a second flood. We will all be incarcerated wherever we happen to be. Are you
indoors, are you addressing a meeting, are you, or rather were you, on your way to a bus stop and obliged to take shelter under a tree. You said you had no knowledge of ever in your life missing anybody. Yes, I think it might rain forever, or at least for forty days and forty nights. That is a form of ever. I will smash these chandeliers bit by bit. It won’t be difficult. They break easily, once when we were washing them, a few of the pieces crumbled. The woman who was helping me couldn’t understand why I laughed, neither could I.
She gave me a bit of advice, said by loving you I was closing the door to all other suitors.
Maybe you are in bed making love to her, or just caressing, the curtains drawn. Anyhow, your rooms are so small that if you are indoors you are bound to be very close. I can see it, the little room, the sofa, the cushions, and I never told you this but there are three ornaments in that room identical to three ornaments of mine. I shall not tell you now either, as I am leaving you to guess.
If only we had been more exuberant. I went there three times in all, two of them against your will. The last time I was hungry, as it happened. You offered me nothing. Are you by any chance a miserly man? I dearly wanted a keepsake of you, and true enough, on one of these unfortunate visits you gave me a handkerchief to dry my eyes, but it was a new one and had nothing of your person on it. I cried a lot. I wonder who washed it. You wash your own trousers, because when I inquired about the white round stains on them you said it was where you had spattered on the undiluted bleach. I could have told you. I wish I had them. If I could hold them now—would hold them and hug them and press them to me.
It is not right to love so. I suppose there is a sickness of heart as well as a sickness of mind and body. Yes, when you first came I really had reached a point where I had stopped looking and you appeared at my door with a pamphlet and you were leaving again and I liked the look of you and I invited you in. They call it fate. I still see your face in the windowpane, appearing, disappearing, reappearing. Oh, my God, a face.
*
Don’t get married, or if you do, tell me, give me warning so that I can get used to it. I won’t give you a wedding present. What an ugly thing to say. Yes, it’s ugly. This house is upside down, that drawing room that you saw, well, it’s a shambles, and there are glasses lying around and the plants haven’t been watered, or if they have, it has been reckless, too much water one day so that they brimmed over, then none for days. There are little pools of water on the floor and those that have dried up have left white marks on the parquet not unlike the bleach on your trousers. How long is it now. My God, it is all a matter of how long it is. The days are jumbled. Just now, lying on my bed—another fatal habit—I saw the tree that I always see, the plane tree, its leaves, and would you believe it, it seemed to me that the bits of sky that I saw through the leaves were leaves also, different-colored leaves, serrated at the edges, so I saw tree leaves and cloud leaves. I am losing my reason. The garden is soggy, a wreck. And although it is summer I definitely smell autumn. I keep thinking that by autumn it will have improved a bit. Then again I think that you will have come back as you threatened to, and that we will be together in the darkest light, under covers, talking, touching, the most terrible reconciliations uttered, uttering. Do you know that in your sleep I stroke and stroke you, and when you waken, no matter how late the hour, you always say, “A lovely way to waken,” and you always stayed a few minutes longer, defied time, and yes, come to think of it, those were our most valuable moments. You were at your best then and without fear. I stood at the door to see you off and only once did you look back. I expect you hate farewells.
The last fling I had was not like this at all, except that he was actually hitched, married. An odd fellow. A Harry. We spent five days away from his country and mine, though in a country much similar, dark and craggy and with a heavy rainfall. Some interesting excavations there, skeletons intact in peat. We drove a lot. He told me how he loved his wife, always did, always would. Wives do not come out too badly in the human maul. We had the same thing each day for lunch—salt bread and herrings and a small glass of spirit. When we got to our destination, we had a suite, and one set of windows faced the sea and another set faced the dormitory town. We picked stones the first morning. I found a beautiful white stone, nearly pearl. I wanted to give it to you. I gave it to a friend of yours, a man you brought here. I didn’t do it to make you jealous but rather to let you know that if all this weight didn’t exist between us I would be able to be nice to you, and maybe you in your turn would be nice to me and even funny and even frivolous. Yes, we once made the noise of turkeys, beeping.
As I got to know this man Harry, he decreased in my estimation. He made a point of telling me about other loves of his and there was always a lot of blood in question. One story of his concerned a very beautiful Spanish virgin, all about her beauty and her moisture, etc. On the very last evening, just as he was consulting the menu for dinner, he said he hoped I had money because he hadn’t brought very much. You see, I was ashamed of him and that is why I paid. Whereas when we went to a hotel, you, who could scarcely afford it, paid. And you set the clock twenty minutes before we were due to wake up so that we could be together for one of those lovely moments, those lovely series of moments. Even you, who profess to miss nothing, can you tell me you don’t miss those? That morning in the hotel was when you first talked of love and made a plan for the future, our future. That morning you lost your head. You must have imagined yourself as someone else or that you could have explained it all to her, ironed it all out. You were quite practical. You said it would take five weeks, but instead of that you were back in a week and I might have known something was amiss, because you came early and you drank heavily and you said could we talk, could we talk. We talked. You said you had had rows with her, two dirty rows, and then at the very end you said you collapsed into one another.
Sweet Jesus, never have I known such a stab. That collapse, I could actually see it and feel it. I saw the hour, it was dawn, and your tiredness and hers and both of you washed out and one or the other of you saying—it matters not which of you—saying, “What am I saying, what am I doing,” and then the collapse, lying down, in your clothes, fitting in a bit of sleep until your baby stirred, and one of you went to tend to it while the other prepared two cups of tea. Maybe while you were shaving you called in and said, “Hey, I hope I didn’t give you a black eye.” Of course it was not all erased, or indeed forgotten, but it was over, it was behind you, and you had accomplished something, shown your ugly colors and got nearer to one another.
I brought you nearer, God help us. Most probably you went out for the day, maybe you went to the library. But no doubt you said roughly what time you would be back and that is the thing. You made it known that you would be back whatever the hour. That was the second bitterest thing, for there is another.
The evening—one of the three occasions when I telephoned and dropped the phone out of shock and then redialed and later saw you in the pub—I asked if I could have a child of yours. You told me point-blank that it was impossible; also, you inferred that I was too old, what with my divorce and my children reared and all that Then after a few whiskeys you decided to invite me back to your house, and on the way back you allowed me to link you until we got near your street, and then you ran on ahead so as not to be spied upon and I followed, slightly ashamed, and, as I said, like a dog.
Still, inside the house you were different. The moment you discovered that your baby hadn’t smothered itself or wasn’t kidnapped or wasn’t choking, you kissed me fondly, fond kisses, many of them, and you removed my coat, and later as we fell to talking you said that in the morning you had got someone to mind your child and you had gone to market and bought razor blades and white cotton handkerchiefs, one of which you offered me—and then came the second and bitterest blow, because as you were telling me, I realized that you had had free time, that you could have seen me, that you could have contacted me, that for once you were not tied to her, but yo
u didn’t, and I realized that it wasn’t she who always came between us. Sometimes it was you.
Guessing my thoughts, you said you loved no one and were interested only in your educational work. When you remember that night, that is, if ever you let loose the hogs of memory, if they stalk, do you remember the subsequent time, the goatskin, you, me, us, perfect then. You can’t have forgotten it all. Couldn’t you have written? Ah yes, you did. A circumspect little letter about how you mustn’t get out of your depth, how it mustn’t be allowed to blossom. Well, it didn’t. Yes, it did. It blossomed, and what’s more, it caught fire, a whole forest of fire.
And another thing, you have softened me toward others. I am prepared to nurse my aged father and my aged mother when the time comes and they call on me. Shall I tell you why. I think by your expression and by one or two things that you say that you did want to be by my side, and constantly, but that a sense of duty restrained you, and a comparison. I needed you less than her. It seems to you that I have advantages over her. Which reminds me, I haven’t told you about the boy who died. I feel responsible; no, not responsible, but somehow involved.
The day I met you I also met another good-looking young man, a doctor in fact. He was a new doctor that I had gone to and he took a bit of a shine to me. I’d gone about my depression. A thing I didn’t want you to know. He saw how it was and he prescribed accordingly. Later that day I met you, having taken the first set of tablets and already believing that magic was at work.
The young doctor visited me in a private capacity, that is, after I had met you. He kissed me, yes. By then I was so enraptured with you that I was nice to everybody. I let him kiss me. I remember our exact conversation, his describing a Caesarean birth, putting his two hands in and lifting the imaginary baby out. He said Caesarean babies had less gumption because they didn’t have to push. He was telling me all this, and I was remarking to myself how deftly his nostrils flared in and out, and then he went a bit far demonstrating this Caesarean to me and I jumped off the cushions. That was another thing. He arranged the cushions for us to loll on. You never did that. You sat at a distance. We talked stiffly. After a long time and nearly always as you were about to leave, you asked if you might come and kiss me, and quite often we met halfway across the room like two animals, little animals charging into one another. Only once did you rebuff me altogether, you said did I have to be so demonstrative. I rushed toward you and embraced you, and you threw me off. You even said that if we did make love it would preclude its ever happening again.
