I Am Having So Much Fun Here Without You

by Courtney Maum

  • • •

  The morning after I arrived at my parents’, I called Julien at the gallery and bashed my mother’s hopes of going out to Gadebridge because I got the green light: the buyers would accommodate an early arrival. I was on my way to London town.

  I’d woken up that morning and assured myself it wasn’t her, it couldn’t be, that there was no way I’d be seeing Lisa at the other side of a door, but still, I paid more attention than usual as I got dressed. I didn’t shave, because she didn’t like me shaven. And then, as punishment for thinking she liked me better one way or the other, I did shave, and did a sorry job of it in my haste.

  From the return address on Lisa’s letters, I knew that the place I was going to didn’t match up, although the postcode district was the same. I spent a considerable amount of time in M1 highway traffic inventing ways that the buyer could still be her—she had a rented office, maybe, she’d used the address of a neighbor—before I brought myself back into reality. It didn’t matter. It couldn’t matter. It. Wasn’t. Her.

  I double-parked in front of 5 Wells Rise and resisted the urge to honk. I checked my reflection in the mirror, and pulled up, then pushed down, my socks. I took a slug of lint off of my pant leg, still thinking what if? What if nothing, Richard. Man the hell up.

  I got out of the car and went up to the white town house. It was narrow and sleek, the kind of place Lisa wouldn’t be happy living in. She liked her buildings dowdy, mossy, old.

  I rang the bell and focused on my breathing. It either wasn’t, or it was.

  “Da-ave!” I heard a man’s voice cry out. “Dave!”

  I closed my eyes. My heart was speeding. After the turn of many door locks, the door swung partly open.

  “Hi, there,” said a small man. “Yes?”

  “I’m Richard Haddon,” I said. “The artist.” I nodded to the car behind me. “I’ve got your bear?”

  “You made it!” he exclaimed, clapping his hands together. “Oooh, let’s do something about the way you’re parked. You’ll throw your hazards on?”

  A tall man came up behind him and reached out his hand.

  “I’m Dave, by the way,” said the small one. “And this is Dan!”

  Dan and Dave. Dave and Dan. Unless she was involved in a sexually unfulfilling triangle, I wasn’t going to see Lisa Bishop today. I used the ten minutes it took us to liberate the painting from the Peugeot to talk my body out of interpreting this information as a blow.

  Once the damn thing was off the roof and safely inside, Dan and Dave invited me to take my shoes off and join them for tea.

  Their house was antiseptic, and I mean this in both an olfactory and an aesthetic sense. Fragrance-wise, it smelled of lemongrass, and all of the furniture—all of it—was white.

  That isn’t to say that their apartment wasn’t cluttered. All of the available surfaces were occupied by art. Now, “art” is subjective, and at the risk of belittling my own projects, I should probably say that I found their personal taste attractive. But I didn’t. It was a mess.

  There are any number of collectors. There’s the new breed of interior-decorator types who don’t care what it is or who painted it, as long as it’s the right size and the color scheme goes with the carpet. Then there are the impressives, who care about the opposite: who painted it, and how much it cost. These are the financial fellows who think expensive art will get them laid. More likely, it’s the size of the domicile itself that’s getting them laid, it’s the location in Notting Hill, or Tribeca, or what have you, but if it comforts them to think that a Rothko got their dick licked, so be it.

  Then there are the obsessives. These are the people who are into one kind of thing. Mexican folk art, African sculpture, steampunk clocks—usually it’s ethnic, or originates from a subculture of some kind.

  My hosts, Dan and Dave, were none of the above. They were the worst types: the eclectics, the types who buy art because they like it, with no consideration as to how such or such an acquisition would harmonize with another piece. Whether a watercolor of four sheep grazing in a muddy field would look good besides a mixed-media sculpture of an electric guitar with a three-foot penis, for example.

  I was standing in front of a velvet bowling ball encased inside of a giant bell jar when Dan brought out a tray of what looked—and I’m being kind here—like phlegmy seltzer, next to a large plate of dried algae.

  “Shall we?” asked Dave, moving toward the center of the room, where a polar-bear skin ran underneath a glass table.

  “Is that real?” I asked, toeing it with my sock.

  “Goodness,” said Dan solemnly. “We’re vegans.”

  “It’s made out of a synthetic fiber called aramid,” Dave explained. “It’s heat resistant. It will be the fiber of the future when the atmosphere is boiling and we don’t have any skin. So you see, with the polar bear . . .”

  They invited me to sit.

  Dave and Dan were both sitting lotus-style with no socks on. There are few things more disconcerting than being in close proximity to a stranger’s naked feet, except being asked by these same strangers to hold hands.

  “Holy Danh,” Dave started, his dry palm in mine, “symbol of unity and wholeness, thank you for bringing Richard Haddon here to complete the circle of creative life. For you, eternal snake god, we put our tails in our mouth and thank you for being able to see things through from start to finish, and for holding together this beautiful world of art and health.”

  I watched in disbelief as both Dan and Dave stuffed their right hands in their mouths and bit them. They remained that way for some time.

  “Gggon!” mumbled Dave, his mouth full of hand flesh. He motioned at me with his free hand to join. “A snake symbolizes unity, eternity, especially when they swallow their own tails!”

  What did I have to lose, really? I was in an international state of limbo with my wife, and soon enough, the world was going to overheat to the point at which it would burn off all my skin. I bit my wrist.

  Afterward, his forearm glistening with saliva, Dave passed me a glass of fermented tea.

  “Dan and I are pagan Continuists,” Dave explained. “We’re completers of the circle. Like our snake god, we, too, try to be the belt around the world that keeps it from bursting apart. So when it comes to art collecting—”

  “We need to meet the artist,” finished Dan. “It’s very important to our belief system that the artist delivers the work himself.”

  “Sometimes it’s not possible, obviously,” said Dave. “Sometimes, the artist is dead.”

  Daniel sighed. “When that happens, we call in a medium to contact him beyond the grave. We’re really committed to this full-circle way of thinking.”

  “It’s the same thing with our diets,” said Dave, nodding toward the tray. “We only eat food that is multicellular and photosynthetic. Multicellular food contains cells that can only fulfill their self-identification process by reaching out and attaching themselves to other cells. So it is with algae. Same thing with kombucha.”

  “Have you always been . . . Continuists?” I asked, peering into my glass.

  “Oh, no,” said Dave, shaking his head. “I was born Catholic. So was Dan.”

  “Yes,” said Dan, taking his partner’s hand in his. “It’s been quite a path for us. Are you an angry person, Richard?”

  I took my first sip of the beverage. Effectively, yes, it tasted like a perfectly fresh seltzer that someone had used as a receptacle for their nasal drip. “I don’t know.” I shrugged. “Sometimes?”

  “You don’t seem very angry from your wonderful Blue Bear.”

  “Well, I painted that while my wife was pregnant. It was . . . a different time.”

  “That’s very kind of you to share that,” said Dan. “That’s very intimate.”

  I smiled. They smiled. I drank more bogey tea. After a while the
y let go of each other’s hand.

  “Dan and I have a question for you, Richard. We would like to ask permission to keep in touch.”

  “Keep in touch?” I said, setting the glass down. “By, eh, how?”

  “Energetically,” they both answered at the same time. “We work with an energy communicator to make sure that the people we are socializing with, the food that we are eating, and the objects we are surrounding ourselves with are all contributing positively to our vital cycles.”

  “All we need is your permission for the energy communicator to check in from time to time,” continued Dave. “She’ll never contact you physically, I mean, by phone or letter, but on a monthly basis or so, she’ll tap into your aura.”

  “From here?” I said.

  “That’s right, from London. It doesn’t matter where you are; luminous radiation has a tremendous range.”

  “Although you might want to tell us if you travel very far away,” added Dave. “Or somewhere that is too populated, like China.”

  “So I need to tell you when I’m going on vacation?”

  “You don’t need to do anything,” said Dave, shaking his head. “We just need to know if you feel open to the possibility of being tapped into. You know, from time to time.”

  “Will I know it’s happening?” I asked.

  “Some people get headaches.” Dan shrugged. “But that’s actually a good sign. A higher-order type of thing.”

  I felt exhausted, depleted, and entirely spaced out. The fact that I couldn’t call Anne to laugh about the fact that this emotionally loaded painting had ended up with a couple of triple-level vegans made me feel almost incapable of meeting the world outdoors.

  “Would you like a baby as a parting gift?”

  I gaped at Dave, confounded. He held up his glass at an angle as a response. “A culture starter? So that you can make your own kombucha?”

  “That’s very kind of you,” I managed, “but I have to take a ferry back. It might, uh, spill.”

  They mumbled in agreement that a boat would be no good. We all hugged again, and I found my shoes. Before I put them on, I cast a final glance at The Blue Bear in the corner.

  “Excuse us,” Dan said, following my gaze. “You must want to say good-bye.”

  I was surprised to realize I did. At the threshold between still owning it and never seeing it again, I felt flush with a deep sense of loss and sadness.

  I walked across their living room toward the sentimental assembly of light and shade and color that captured an emotion that I didn’t know how to get back. I stared at the painting for quite a while, hoping for an answer. But the only thing that came was the numbing disappointment of having nothing happen.

  “Thank you for having me,” I said, turning toward them. “I hope that you enjoy it.”

  And with that, I tied my shoes back on, slipped into my coat, and walked out into a world with no snake god holding it together, where everything I’d needed to help me find my place had come suddenly undone.

  10

  WHEN I got home, my parents were both out. In the kitchen, a hot pot of yellow curry was stinking up the house. I checked my cell phone: nothing. Or nothing that I wanted. I had a text message from Julien asking how the delivery went. It was going to take me a while to come up with an answer.

  It was gone. It felt like everything was. With The Blue Bear delivered, sitting however many hundred miles from the endangered species of my family, I had to fight not to sink into a despondent bog. If I never came home again—if Anne didn’t let me back—what, really, would she miss? She would miss the convenience of me, surely, she’d need to get a nanny, there would be a lot of logistics things like that. She wouldn’t miss the comfort of me because I hadn’t been comforting for a long time. It had been ages since I’d made her laugh.

  And she certainly wouldn’t miss the sex. We’d had a great sex life, even after Camille’s birth. But after a while I began to feel self-conscious about our acts. At some point, I started making Anne ashamed of her desires, and she, accordingly, started having fewer of them. It began to feel wrong somehow, letting a mouth—one that had asked you to leave the chicken thighs out to thaw an hour earlier—open and close around your dick.

  I think there were a lot of times when I turned sexual opportunities into outcomes I could resent. There was this one time at a highway gas station during a little getaway to Cinque Terre—we’d had a fight because I’d tossed Anne’s Andrea Bocelli CD out while she’d been asleep and the fight turned into witty banter which turned into something else. I remember her cupping her hands around my face, how I fumbled for the seat belt buckle so that we could get closer. The heat of her palms moving down my pants, her breath warm against my neck, and her twisting in her seat, about to move her right leg over to crouch on top of me. And I remember her expression when I pulled her hand up to my lips, and asked if she wanted anything from inside.

  Anne would have had sex with me in that Italian parking lot, but I didn’t let things get there because I assumed she couldn’t possibly want to do it in a public place, and I walked into the convenience store with my half-mast erection thinking it was a shame that she wasn’t more adventurous. And I think I’ve kept doing that. Assumed my way through years of similar moments—chosen inertness over spontaneity, and blamed my wife when I was disappointed. I assumed and blamed and displaced my way into another women’s arms.

  As the curry odor began to overpower the house, I sat there bemoaning the brute physicality that we’d once shared. I mean, Jesus: kissing. Kissing with tongue. I literally cannot remember the last time I snogged my beautiful, lost wife. I hate that things have gotten so familiar between us. And yet, five hundred miles away from her, I want familiar back.

  • • •

  My parents came home around 6 p.m., all apologies and red cheeks because they’d gone to Gadebridge.

  “Your mum was just so excited when it didn’t rain,” said my dad. “How did the dropping-off go?”

  “It was nuts,” I answered, rising from the couch. “They’re nuts. They’re ‘Continuists.’ They complete circles. They have to meet the maker of everything in their house.”

  “Well, isn’t that a nice way of doing things,” said my mum, pecking my cheek on her way to the kitchen. “Did you stir this while we were out?”

  “No,” I replied.

  “That’s okay,” my mum said. “It doesn’t need to be stirred.”

  I shook my head. My dad sat down in front of me on the recliner.

  “You okay?” he asked.

  “I don’t know.”

  His face darkened. “You want to go to the local?” he asked.

  “Oh, Jesus,” I said. “Green Acres? That place is the worst.”

  “Yeah,” he said. “But it’s close.”

  “It’s okay,” I said. “I’m tired. There was a lot of traffic, and these people—they were exhausting.”

  “I’m sure.” He flicked something off his trousers. “You know when you’re heading back, then?”

  I shook my head. “No . . . I thought I’d spend a bit more time. You know, I’m here so rarely. Alone.”

  My dad was squinting at me.

  “Richy,” he said, leaning closer. “You okay?”

  “Yeah.” I felt my eyes water. “No, Dad. I fucked up.”

  His eyes didn’t move from me. He sat back in his chair.

  “Dammit.” He sighed. He crossed his arms and remained silent for some time. “Is she going to forgive you?”

  I shook my head.

  “Was it a friend?”

  “No,” I said, reddening. “It wasn’t anyone we knew, it wasn’t—”

  “You boys want some crackers?” my mother yelled from the kitchen.

  “No, love,” my dad called back. “We’re fine!”

  “I’m actually really h
ungry,” I mumbled.

  “Scratch that,” he yelled out. “Cheese and crackers would be grand.”

  He leaned forward in his chair again. “Do you want to talk about this?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “I can’t.”

  “We can talk about it,” he said. “I won’t hold it against you.”

  My brow furrowed. “I didn’t think you would.”

  “Well, we really love her, is the thing,” he said. “You kids need to find a way to make it work.”

  “It’s felt like nothing but that,” I said.

  He took a throw pillow from behind his back and turned it over in his hands, troubling the tassels at each corner with his fingers. “You still don’t get it, do you?” he said, frowning. “You know what? I don’t think I want to talk about this either. I’m going to help your mother with the snacks.” Right before he reached the doorway to the kitchen, he turned around. “If you’ve already made a mess of it, don’t make it worse by being disappointing. She doesn’t deserve it.”

  I watched him disappear into the kitchen. From the couch where I was sitting, I saw him greet the woman who had been away from his side for only three minutes with a kiss.

  • • •

  Before dinner, I called my in-laws’ landline again. Inès picked up and told me Anne was out, having a cocktail with a friend.

  “A friend?” I said. “In the off-season?”

  “Hmm-mm,” she said, distractedly. “Pierre.”

  “Oh,” I said, running through the shortlist of our Breton acquaintances for such a name. “And how was your day?”

  “My day? My day was fine, Richard. When are you coming back? The Martis are coming over on Tuesday. We’re doing paella. I know,” she huffed. “It takes all day. But they’re just back from Spain, so you know, it’s a gesture. I’ve got a soufflé dropping here, I have to run.”