Al's Well

by Dark, Gregory

  “He wouldn’t be back. People always say they’re going to be back, they swear blind they’re going to be. But they never are. Life intervenes. Plans change. I’d never see him again. So I figured, I’d go to bed with him, and I figured I’d enjoy it. And that’d be that. It’d be a sweet memory to curl up in front of the fire with during the long, long fall of matrimony.

  “Matrimony! What a goddamn word: ‘matrimony’. Doesn’t that sound to you like a kind of murder? Cousin, sort of, to matricide or something? Second cousin permanently removed. And I guess it is, a sort of murder.

  “Oh God. Oh shit, I am so sorry. That has to be a gag in the worst kind of taste. Not a gag, but, you know, a comment, whatever. Of the tackiest taste, in fact. The tackiest and yuckiest. Sorry. It’s not even as though I meant it. I did love Al. Do, what am I talking about? ‘Case you didn’t know that. I mean, me being here, that’s what it’s all about. Mostly. Me agreeing to this interview.

  “See, I did it again. Strayed from the point. … Know how I know that? Your eyes sort of glass over. The lights are on, kinda thing, but the house has been abandoned. I’m stopping saying ‘sorry’, by the way. Right after I’ve said this one: Sorry. For the last time.

  “‘You’re an itch,’ I told him.

  “‘And you need to scratch me?’

  “‘Do you mind?’

  “‘Being an itch?’

  “‘A sexy kind of itch.’

  “‘Like crabs, then?’

  “‘No!’” I said.

  “He said, ‘I don’t mind being an itch.’

  “‘You don’t?’

  “‘Not a mosquito bite? Not athletes’ foot or anything?’

  “‘A real sexy itch.’

  “‘Just scratch me, Trove.’

  “This won’t make any sense to you – I know this won’t make any sense to you, you know how? ’Cause it don’t make sense to anyone else – it does to me, but that’s not the point. See what it was, I knew I was cheating on him – would be cheating on him, on Al – but what it wasn’t, I wasn’t betraying him. No, no, that’s not right either. No, more truthfully, it didn’t feel like I’d be betraying him. Oh, I know you can rationalise anything, justify anything. But I really felt, I genuinely felt, I’d be helping us, it’d be helping us, our marriage. Christ, even our future together.

  “Scratch the itch and the itch just means nothing any more. But, shit, if you don’t scratch the itch … You ever had one in your gums, an itch? You know, in that gap right after the dentist’s before the Novacaine’s worn off? You can feel the itch and you know your nails are scratching it, but you can’t feel the goddamn scratch. Remember how crazy that can make you feel? The bitch that itch can be? Well, it was kinda of the same deal here. No, more, like an itch under the plaster of a broken leg. It starts to assume an importance completely disproportionate to its … well, importance. ‘Importance’ is the only word I can think of. It becomes, like, the biggest deal in the world. You’d burn your husband at the stake to stop that itch, sell your children into slavery. ’Course, if I’d ever have had children, I’d have sold them into slavery years before, but, yeah, that’s also kinda beside the point.

  “No, it’s fine. It’s better than fine, actually. Actually, much better than fine. It’s something I need to know. It’s weird, this, how easy all this is. How easy you are, for Christ’s sakes. I mean, I’m not sure I knew what to expect, but whatever the hell I was not expecting, it certainly wasn’t this.

  “Like then, in a lot of ways. See, then, it was – as the song says – it was all so simple then.

  “And then … Well, and then it went and got itself complicated.”

  +++

  Maison d’arrêt de Toulouse-Seysses, 23rd February 06

  Dear Trove:

  I understand from my attorneys that you have been to visit them. I cannot believe you.

  May I remind you that, honey child, you’re responsible for this entire fucking mess? Mind your own bees’ wax, Trove. Haven’t you done enough?

  Al

  Chapter 2

  It is only young men who look into mirrors. It comes as something of a shock therefore when old men look back. That’s something you too, Drew, will come to discover in time. Each man has to discover that for himself.

  I could cope with the greyness. It added, I thought, a sprinkle of wisdom to the wickedness which winked in, and from, my eyes. It was the balding I found unacceptable. I’d asked my hairdresser not to show me the back view of my haircut; in mirrored lifts I’d lower my eyes. The mirrors I had at home were those from which only my head-on image was reflected. Those whatever-they’re-called, those sort of winged mirrors that Eva had used to make up with, I threw away shortly after she died. Denial might not be a river in Egypt, but it is sometimes a life-raft in an ocean of insecurity.

  I was having qualms, Drew.

  I never had qualms.

  I was sea-sick once, I remember. Never had I been sea-sick before – not in the Bay of Biscay, not in the roughest seas, nor those sort of rolling from side-to-side seas. The appallingness that was the sea-sickness was ten times worse for being so unfamiliar. Well, it was a similar thing here with my qualms. The unfamiliarity of the sensation was multiplying its inherent discomfort. And that discomfort was consequently acquiring the status of queasiness. I do not like feeling queasy – any more than I like feeling qualms.

  God, this is all so difficult for me, writing all this stuff. I don’t know whether or not, between father and son, it’s even ‘appropriate’. I’m not just a fish out of water, I’m a tropical fish beached on an ice-floe. And it’s that much harder, not being sure whether I should be doing it at all.

  Your mother used to ‘joke’ that my only commitment was to a lack of commitment. I’m sure I have no need to remind you! And that I should be “committed” for such lack of commitment. I used to be quite hurt by the ‘joke’. I was meant to be, I think. But maybe what hurt me most was just how accurate it was.

  I do want to change today, though, Drew. And I do want to commit to you and to the child that Jane’s about to have – that you both are, of course I mean.

  You won’t ever get to read this, I don’t suppose, until I’m dead. (Oh, don’t read anything sinister into that remark, it’s not that I’m planning suicide or anything. I simply can’t imagine the circumstances in which, alive, I could give this to you … or post it to you … or do with it what I would have to do in order for you to get it.)

  God knows, I’ll have left you little enough materially. I suppose this might be the time to apologise for that too. And God knows, there’s precious little of a relationship between the two of us for you to remember it with affection – or with anything else, for that matter. (A state of affairs for which, in case you were wondering, I do, yes, hold myself entirely responsible.) Try as I might, when we’re together, I simply cannot be as open with you as I’d like to be. Habits are always hard to break. Habits of a lifetime … I fear, a ‘lifetime’ harder.

  Writing, though, I thought … Well, if I wrote about me, committed to paper stuff about me – like you were a diary or something – came a little bit clean about me, let you know about private things about me, maybe there’d be a little something I could give you, a soupçon of knowledge, a soupçon of me. And, maybe with knowledge, the beginnings of some kind of measured … is it forgiveness I’m talking about? Or understanding? Or even just acceptance that that was who I was? If you don’t know me, I suppose is what I’m telling myself, how can you possibly accept me?

  I could well have misjudged that as well. That too I do understand. If I have, I’m sorry about that as well. I will have died the stupid bastard you’ve known that I am from the moment you first had knowledge.

  Stupid bastard, though, though I am, I have noticed you’re an adult. About to be a father, in fact! I’m therefore going to presume you’re adult about adult things. So …

  Well, here goes nothing, I suppose.

  I’d had affairs
before …, there that’s said it. Yes, even when I was still with your mother. Yes, and when I was with Eva too. On other occasions (between the two), the adultery had been defined by her being married, ‘her’ my partner in tryst. Even, two or three times, when we both were, for God’s sake. I don’t say this with any pride. Just … ‘warts and all’ compulsion, I suppose. If I’m going to let you know about me, you have to know all about me – about, I should rather say, the all of me.

  Trove was a desirable woman, Drew. Desirable? God, that’s an understatement and a half. Like calling her ‘supportive’ when Eva was dying. Somewhat, as I already said, like calling Michelangelo a bit of a chiseller. Or like calling Al one, come to that. It’s not to my taste, his work, that’s true. I’m not going to pretend that it is. It’s no criticism of his work that it’s not to my taste. Probably to the contrary. Probably I’m not sophisticated enough for it. And, anyway, who am I to judge? His reputation even then was international. And his red fedora was considered to be one of the sights of Toulouse!

  Trove was not just desirable, she was enormously desirable: Twelve on the Prickter scale, three thousand degrees Fuckenheit.

  Her eyes were so blue, psychotically blue, and all the blueness was lewdness. There was harlotry in those eyes (those blue, blue eyes), an uninhibited lust which augured well for bedtime frolic and which promised sojourns not just in exotic shenanigans, but on Kama Sutran safaris.

  Qualms? Queasiness? You don’t have qualms embarking on a safari. Well, some people might, but then some people aren’t Michael. Michael certainly doesn’t. Have qualms … feel qualms, whatever. This wasn’t me, Drew, this wasn’t Michael. Michael was urbane and licentious, not entirely devoid of scruples but such bescrupledness subject – abjectly – to the adage that a standing prick hath no conscience. And that, once it wath standing no more, neither need the prick suddenly acquire one.

  What the hell, I wanted to know, does one do with qualms? I mean, what completely useless things to have! A sort of Sinclair C5 of the ethical world. Do qualms have any use? At all, I mean? What would a mint-condition qualm buy you, for instance? A hair-shirt, maybe? A designer one?

  – “Collar, sir?”

  – “Fifteen-and-a-half.” –

  – “I’ll give you a fourteen-and-a-half, then, sir.”

  – “Oh, and give me three lengths of sackcloth and two tons of ashes.”

  – “Would that be regular ashes, sir, or those from the fires of Purgatory?”

  – “Oh, your very best ashes, my good man. And do make sure they’re still cindery. Don’t want not really to scourge my wicked body.”

  – “Very good, sir.”

  It was Kelly. That’s what had done for me. That, I suddenly realised, was where the queasiness was coming from: not qualms but insecurity. Kelly had been a stunning-looking woman, fifteen years my junior and with a PhD in sexual sciences. And … Well, I had, as the phrase goes, failed to ‘rise to the occasion’. The spirit had been overwhelmingly willing, but the flesh … Alas, the flesh was hurtling towards Viagraism.

  Oh, a stage fright on the first bedding, that I’d known before. First night nerves, I’d always ascribed it to. But the nerves around Kelly yawned into the second night and the third. And this despite a series of massages and manoeuvres which would have had a eunuch whimpering. The fourth night, the fifth … I tried to tell myself it was the aftermath of the operation, a side-effect. But I signally failed to call the surgeon to check whether that could be the case.

  As you know, I’d quit smoking some years previously; my drinking by then I’d restricted to wine only on occasions when I dined with friends; my diet was almost grotesquely healthy. Was God now going to deprive me of the one vice apparently still left available to me?

  No! Please God, let it not be that. Please don’t let the impotence be physical. Or medical. I had to be sure of it. I had to check. You know how far Agen is from Toulouse. No-one knows me in Agen. I drove all the way there just so I wouldn’t be seen. In Agen I sneaked into a back-street newsagent’s (just to be on the safe side, you understand). Bought myself a porn magazine – strictly, you understand, in the interests of medical research.

  French pornography is … well, you probably know … candid. Porno with the emphasis on graphic. To the point almost of being gynaecological. Indeed too graphic sometimes to be exciting. But I was, yes, excited by it, my Agen mag. Aroused by it. The flesh, I was gratified to note, was still able to venerate Venus, still able to rise in tribute to her, still even enthusiastic in its veneration. It was only with a few of her earthly acolytes that a very occasional … agnosticism would rear its ugly head. Or not, if you catch my drift.

  Oh Portnoy, oh Portnoy, I lamented, what, old chum, do we do now?

  – “Screw Trove!” ‘Portnoy’ commented.

  – “You really mean that? You really mean, ‘Screw Trove’?” I asked him.

  But it was me myself who replied. – “No. You cannot screw Trove. Screw Trove and you screw yourself, Mike, up. You screw yourself, Mike, right up.”

  – “Oh, and like now I’m not screwed up?”

  – “Screw Trove and you screw up the friendship with Trove.”

  – “Ah.”

  – “See, it’s not qualms, Michael, it’s fear.”

  – “Friends are harder to find than lovers.”

  – “It is thus that conscience doth make cowards of us all.”

  – “No.”

  – “No?”

  – “It’s not me being cowardly.”

  – “It isn’t?”

  – “It’s me having scruples.”

  – “Scruples?”

  – “Yeah. Having scruples, yeah.”

  – “Nah, it’s cowardly, Mike.”

  – “You’re right.”

  – “That’s all you’ve got to say?”

  – “For the moment.”

  – “Anything else?”

  – “Yes.”

  – “What?”

  – “Screw Trove.”

  – “And that would mean?”

  ...

  – “I DON’T KNOW!”

  +++

  “Trove, can you talk?”

  “Not really.”

  “Al’s there?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “You can only answer yes or no?”

  “Not even. See, I’m just about to leave, Ann, for the shops. With Al.””

  “I’ll be at home till five.”

  “I’ll call you on your mobile.”

  “After five, then?”

  “Uh-huh. Got to shoot, Nancy. Later.”

  +++

  “See, Mike, I’ve got to call you.”

  “You are calling me.”

  “That’s how it has to be: I call you.”

  “You also called me both Ann and Nancy.”

  “You’re kidding, right?”

  “About two seconds apart.”

  “You’re kidding, Mike.”

  “CIA training clearly isn’t what it used to be.”

  “Goddamn senior moments.”

  “Tell me about them.”

  “I can’t hurt Al, Mike.”

  “I know.”

  “That’s conditional.”

  “I know, Trove.”

  “It’s sort of conditional, honey, my unconditional love.”

  “It always is.”

  “This phone traffic, is what I’m trying to say, it’s got to be oneway only, Mike.”

  “Right.”

  “I thought that was clear.”

  “So many rules. My senior moments. I’m afraid I lose track.”

  “Lose track, Mike, and you lose me. I’m not kidding here. This is my marriage we’re talking about. I’m not fooling around with it.”

  “Okay.”

  “You sulking?”

  “No.”

  “That pause was then … ?”

  “Not sulking. Taking it on board.”

  “Okay.”
<
br />   “Taking on board your admonition.”

  “That, as in the ‘ad-monissionary’ position? Don’t sulk, Mike.”

  “One of the very few pleasures still affordable. That and peeing.”

  “I’m actually paying you quite a compliment.”

  “Okay.”

  “See, I get all … I don’t know … girly, see, when I hear your voice.”

  “That is a compliment.”

  “He’s not an idiot, Al …”

  “No. Certainly not an idiot.”

  “After twenty-three years of marriage he knows me quite well.”

  “Right.”

  “Not as well as he should. Still and all …”

  “Pretty well.”

  “It’s twenty-three years, can you believe that?”

  “Amazing.”

  “Can you not talk?”

  “There are people looking at the flat.”

  “Are they with you?”

  “In the room?”

  “Yes.”

  “No.”

  “But they might come in any minute, huh?”

  “As indeed I might.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “Come. Any minute. …”

  “Mike! —-”

  “… So excited am I by the sound of your voice.”

  “—- Are you talking dirty to me?”

  “Oh, I do so hope so.”

  “You’re not just joshing me?”

  “Oh, I do so hope not.”

  “You’ve done a lot of joshing, Mike, over the years.”

  “I’m a good josher.”

  “It’s a great word, ‘joshing’. A lot of flirting, to boot.”

  “To boot?”

  “That’s your word, Mike. I learnt it from you.”

  “Two words, Trove.”

  “Too close for comfort.”

  “To condescension?”

  “Way too close for comfort.”

  “Talking of twos …”

  “Still in the danger zone.”

  “Even more than the tango, Trove, it takes two, I was going to say, to flirt.”

  “Say more dirty things to me. No, say real dirty things to me.”