Al's Well

by Dark, Gregory

  “Don’t tell me it’s a compliment, actually.”

  “It is, Mike, it is.”

  “Just don’t tell me it is.”

  “I told you up-front, Mike. I made it very clear.”

  “I know.”

  “I thought it was going to be …”

  “So did I.”

  “I never thought it was going to be …”

  “No. Me neither.”

  “This was not, Mike, on the agenda.”

  “No.”

  “I love you, Michael.”

  “I think you do.”

  “It’s twenty-three years, hon.”

  “Yes.”

  “I can’t just kiss that away.”

  “No.”

  “Not on a whim. Not, Mike, without thinking about it.”

  “No.”

  “Do you forgive me?”

  “Do you need me to?”

  “I need you to love me, Mike. I know that’s ridiculous and that’s selfish. Truly ridiculous, in fact, and mind-blowingly selfish.”

  “I do love you, Trove.”

  “I know, you know, I could be making the biggest mistake of my life.””

  “You don’t have to make it.”

  “Yes, Mike, I do. You know why?”

  Because it could be the biggest mistake of your life.”

  “Exactly. I think about you, Mike, all the time. I mean, all the time.”

  “Well, of course then, you have to break up with me.”

  “It’s not easy, this, for me.”

  “And I’m truly sorry about that.”

  “It’s a month – it’s not even a month, is what I’m saying – versus …”

  “Twenty-three years, don’t tell me.”

  “Twenty-three years, Mike, is twenty-three years.”

  “I’m not trying to make light of it.”

  “Us? We’re not even twenty-three days.”

  “It feels like longer.”

  “I’ll ache for you, Mike.”

  “And I’ll ache for you, Trove.”

  “We can still see each other, right? I mean, we’re still friends, no? We can still be friends, see each other as friends?”

  “Maybe in a little while.”

  “You could be right. I don’t want to say goodbye.”

  “Me either.”

  “Say ‘ass’.”

  “Arse.”

  “Getting closer. ‘Me either’, an improvement in ‘ass’ ... How sad.”

  “Sad, yes.”

  “We’ll never know, I guess.”

  “No.”

  “In neither sense, Mike, do I want to say goodbye.”

  “In neither sense do I want you to.”

  “You say it, Mike.”

  “Must I?”

  “I’d be grateful.”

  “Goodbye, Trove.”

  “I love you, honey.”

  “I love you too.”

  “‘Bye.”

  “Honey.”

  +++

  “The night he and Petrova split up, Michael called me. He phoned to tell me, he said, that his daughter-in-law had still not podded, and that if such continued to be the case by the following Tuesday, they were going to induce. He phoned to tell me how unpleasant the British Immigration officers were, searching his car, looking for stowaway aliens. He told me how badly signposted the British roads were and how awful the food on the ferry. And then, with a casualness I’m sure he honestly thought was deceptive, he told me how he and Petrova were an item no more.

  “I had not to hear the crack in his voice.

  “Let me take you to lunch. I’m getting peckish, frankly. It’d do my reputation locally so much good, I cannot tell you, to be seen lunching with a beautiful woman. There’s a bistro nearby. Nothing fancy. We could talk as we ate.

  “Good. After you, then. Of course, we can. Talk as we go, of course.

  “I had to ask him dispassionately how he felt about that, and I had to hear him reply that he was a wee bit upset, but – hey! – that had been the understanding from the outset. He could have no complaints. And I wanted to tell him, for Christ’s sake, shout or something, cry, smash a plate or two – anything! – but I didn’t, of course. I murmured about it being sad, and suggested (as one always does in such circumstances) that there were plenty more fish in the sea, and I let him bang on about the exorbitant cost of London (where he’d gone for the day) and the execrable standard of its public transport.

  “So, where shall we sit? Sun or shade? What about that table in the corner? Looks fine to me. Shall we? There we go.

  “A storm had to blow itself out. It wasn’t the right storm. But it was better than no storm at all. Do you like bouillabaisse? If you like bouillabaisse try this one. You’ve never had bouillabaisse till you’ve had this one.”

  +++

  My dearest Trove,

  My godmother died when I was fifteen or sixteen. I scarcely knew her. But I was devastated. My grandmother (mother’s mother) I knew well. And was fond of. Even very fond of. She died when I was twenty-two or -three. I’m not going to say I wasn’t saddened by her death, but I didn’t think something either huge or cataclysmic had happened. The point I’m trying to make is that age or experience or both inure us to calamity. It’s the doctor syndrome, in other words: We cannot feel the wound of each arrow or each sling shot. Certainly not all those of those around us. Our psyches won’t allow it. We cannot feel each pain with the intensity of the first – neither our own, nor those of others. If we did, we’d go mad.

  I’m saddened by the end of ‘us’, therefore, but I’m not devastated by it. Nor do I feel devastated by it. Up-front, you said you weren’t proposing an affair to rival Romeo and Juliet. I think, frankly, that went without saying. I think we’re both too old. I’m no longer as juvenile as Romeo: I no longer believe that the end of ‘us’ is the end of me. I no longer even believe that the end of ‘us’ is an indication of the inadequacy of me. If anything, rather the reverse. In our youth we are compatible with a universe of possible partners. Like our skin, our characters are then so elastic or malleable or amorphous we can shape them into virtually anything we choose – or that we need them to be. Oh, I don’t think that elasticity is cynical. (Opportunistic, occasionally, when seduction appears to require it, but not openly cynical.) I don’t think it’s our less than admirable Prime Minister, in other words, wondering which of his several thousand faces would best suit the occasion. I think, rather to the contrary, that it is remarkably ingenuous. In our youth it is precisely that elasticity which frees us up to explore the various dimensions, aspects and qualities of our personalities – sometimes which are very well hidden.

  It’s, if you like, back-packing of the soul. And that’s just as arduous as the physical type. As sapping of energy – and as beneficial. We close avenues at our peril.

  Beyond some pre-pubescent fumbling at school, I never had a homosexual encounter. I’ve never really been tempted to. But, at an intellectual level, I feel the lack of that. I feel it might well be like never having tried … I don’t know … sushi, for instance, or a sauna. Sheridan – you’ve heard me talk of Sheridan – is fond of saying that, sexually, he’s not going to die curious. I’ve always rather envied him that. No. No ‘rather’ about it.

  But, over the years, our characters do start firming up (or seizing up, depending on your point of view). And we find it harder and harder to adapt to the foibles and quirks of others – particularly domestically. We’ve tried Chinese food, and we know we like bird’s nest soup and we don’t like sweet and sour shrimp. We no longer need to experiment. And the older we get the less that need.

  It’s no new thought that life is cyclical. Something else that binds the infant and the dotard is their yearning for the familiar. Because for both, the familiar represents safety – and the new or untried or innovative, those are threatening.

  For me happiness is threatening. That, I’m sure, sounds odd. Bizarre, even. But I don’t think
I’m alone. For people like me happiness can seem very threatening. Come from some village in Southern Italy, and the underground system in Milan is threatening. The first time, though, a Milanese visits London, the underground system there, because it is several times larger, that is also threatening. But that threat is nothing against that of a Londoner for the first time presented with the smaller Athens underground system, or the Moscow one. Because for the Londoner not even the characters on the maps there are familiar. In Athens or Moscow, I mean. The place names on the tube map in either place are just for an English speaker so many squiggles.

  I know my way around unhappiness. That’s what I’m trying to say. It’s familiar territory. I know I change at Leicester Square for the Piccadilly line and I disembark at L’Etoile for the Arc de Triomphe. But happiness? That can be really scary. Daunting, even. On a good day, it is Athens – hot, exciting, challenging even, domitable. An adventure. But on a bad day, happiness can seem like the Moscow underground in the middle of a Russian winter during the worst of the Stalinist purges: cold, hostile, dangerous, overpowering, nerve-racking. A nightmare.

  And on such days I find myself scurrying back to safety – to the unhappiness I know and that I’m familiar with – with as much despatch as my creaking legs can muster.

  You see, I deserve unhappiness.

  Well, I don’t, of course. No-one deserves it – not as staple fare. And yet for so many of us, myself included, it was that which we heard in childhood. It was that the lesson we took home with us from childhood. And we heard it time after time after time again. You’ll notice I don’t say that was what I was told. I have no idea. There’s so much of my childhood I won’t allow myself to remember – and so much more I’ve simply, and uncomplicatedly, forgotten. But I am saying that’s what I heard. Over and over – and over again.

  Yes, from my parents. But, do you know what? I’m not sure that’s the issue. If it was from my parents that I first heard it, the over and over again which validated it, which made it real and keeps it real, that was from teachers, primarily, from friends, from things I saw on television, read in the papers. It was an entire culture which said if I wasn’t outstanding I was worthless. And the worthless, so that culture goes on to say, they deserve every drop of misery which they create for themselves.

  The end of ‘us’ saddens me for two … entities, I suppose the right word is – for me and for the ‘us’ that now is no more. For me it saddens me because, with you, I found myself more often on the Athens metro of happiness than the Gulag Express. I was even getting used to the idea of happiness. Thinking of getting my own copy of the tube map. Even – God bless the mark – believing I was entitled to some happiness. And if that sounds whiney then I apologise. It wasn’t meant to be.

  And I certainly do not mean that you introduced me to happiness. There have throughout my life been joyous times – enormously joyous times. And with Eva, I found that a sort of sedentary, un-wow-wooppee un-unhappiness was possible, even desirable, as an emotional base. (Whereas, pre-Eva, I had always imagined that the only plausible base was one of discontentedness, permanently rumbling, often fractious, sometimes explosive.) With you, I was beginning to find that happiness need not be attached only to the momentary. I was beginning to discover that cohabitation was possible between sedentary contentment and a more restless, more quixotic and temperamental, positive joy. And that such joy does not compromise, but rather enhances, that contentment.

  But because I continue today to have that un-unhappiness as an emotional base, it’s okay too that the lesson I was receiving from you was truncated. You’ve embarked me on a journey – something for which I shall always be grateful. More than that. It’s now down to me whether or not I continue with it. That is my responsibility. And mine alone.

  For ‘us’, what saddens me about ‘us’, about the now deceased ‘us’, is that the lesson was truncated. Or, rather, that the scenario was not allowed to play itself out. It’s a bit like leaving ‘Hamlet’ before the dénouement. Oh, you know how it’s going to end – there is an inevitability, at that point, about its end. And yet you still need, don’t you, to see the bodies strewn across the stage? You still need Ophelia to lose her marbles and for Yorick to be alased over.

  I knew we wouldn’t last. Maybe even knew we shouldn’t. Our flame initially had burnt too brightly. It had to be spent quickly. Had to be. I just felt – feel – that I needed too to experience some kind of flickering and fizzling, not have the light just snuffed out. That bright, bright light. That incandescent flame.

  I have loved you, Trove, and I always will. That won’t stop me loving others. It might even enable me to love them more completely. Because the love I have for you – as the love I have for Eva – that has been absorbed by me now. It is not even a part of me, but one with me. You have been absorbed as Handel’s ‘Messiah’ has been. Or ‘Yesterday’. Or Yorkshire Pudding. And I love having you as integral to me. It is an aspect of my own personality of which I am very fond.

  Please look after yourself. Always with my love – Mike xx.

  Chapter 8

  “I tried to go back to Al. Really. You’re looking perplexed. Sure, I was back living with him. What I mean, I tried, I mean, to go back to Al emotionally.

  “Or do I mean emotionally? Commitmently would be more accurate, I guess. I had to return – I guess this is what I’m saying – to the commitment I’d had. Or made. To the, anyway, whatever I had or made.

  “Twenty-three years, that’s a lot of years. I mean, a lot of years. Well, sure, I know, back home, they’re handing out prison time like that for going the wrong way down a one-way street. But in most civilised countries, you’d have change – twenty-three years – from a couple of murder sentences.

  “Shit, sorry, that was slightly more than unfortunate, that too. I didn’t mean it. It just sort of came out, and sort of from nowhere. Don’t ask me why – the similarity, I guess, between ‘commitment’ and ‘committal’. Some kind of word play – word association – in my head. Not conscious. ‘Commit’, now I think of it, ‘commitment’, ‘committal’: what a strange trio. I mean, clearly they’ve got the same base, the three of them. ‘Parade’ and ‘paradise’, same deal – ‘laughter’ and ‘slaughter’. Those eyes of yours, hon, they’ve glassed over again!”

  +++

  Maison d’arrêt de Toulouse-Seysses, 27th April 06

  Dear Mom and Dad:

  Thank you so much for your letter. Brief though it was, it was incredibly welcome. And let in a chunk of light that was like a fluorescent beam to me.

  I do know how much you’re hurting and that that hurt was caused by me. And I want you to know therefore how particularly grateful I am for your words.

  There is still a chasm – I know that. I appreciate it and do not make light of it. But before any bridge can be built there has to be the agreement that it’s a good idea to build one.

  I know we haven’t yet arrived at that point. But I think we have arrived at a point where we agree to talk about whether or not a bridge be built. It was a milestone in the Middle East – remember? – when both sides agreed to talk about talks about talks.

  I’m rambling on, forgive me. Yes, please do forgive me for that. Because if you forgive me today for that and tomorrow for rambling even more on and on and on, then (at some distant time in the future) there’s just a chance you may end up forgiving me for the rest. It is the hope of one day achieving that goal that which pulls me through one bleak and dreary day to the next.

  Your loving son – Al.

  +++

  “Emotionally, is what I’m saying, I needed to be at home. Emotionally, see, all the time now I was with Al, I was with Mike. And when I had sex with Al … No, I wasn’t actually having sex with Mike. But the comparison was constant – and the comparisons.

  “He’d been a great lover, Al. A great lover. But sex in marriage, it all becomes a little bit, doesn’t it, like painting by numbers? You know what I mean? Those pictures yo
u can buy – leastways, that you used to be able to – where you paint in the numbered spaces: one is for, like, scarlet, two for olive green, three for chestnut brown … you know the idea. Well, sex in marriage, doesn’t it, becomes rather like that? Two minutes of making out. During the second minute of which, hand goes to right breast. Suck on the right breast … two, three … whilst the left hand … two, three … tweaks the left’s nipple. It’s all mechanical. Rote. Sexual parroting … sexual Pavlov’s dogs. Panting, I should say, by numbers.

  “I make it sound awful. Sorry. It wasn’t, and I didn’t mean to. I make him sound awful. And that’s not right either. Or fair. It wasn’t and he wasn’t. It was, what it was, it was routine. If a routine had developed, which it had, and if it was routine, which it was, then I was just as guilty as he was of having allowed it to develop.

  “More, goddammit. Shoot, yes, more. Because, at the end of the day, the initiative was mine. And that – Jesus, did it ever! – that started to gripe. Of course I made all the mistakes: I was the only one doing anything. You know what I mean? I mean – Jesus – it’s so easy never to make a mistake if you never do anything. Know the easiest way never to fall off a horse? Never get on one of the suckers.

  “It was like a sledge-hammer.

  “I was sitting at home one afternoon. No big deal. I wasn’t travelling in the direction of Damascus, or anything. This was, what, three weeks, I guess, thereabouts after I’d, as it were, said good-bye to Mike, and I was sitting, I remember, on the couch. Stroking one of the cats. Wondering why it was I was feeling so un-at-home at home. And then it hit me: I wasn’t at home. ‘Course I wasn’t feeling at home, I wasn’t there.

  “I mean, does a koala feel at home in a bee-hive? Or a penguin in the rain forest?”

  +++

  “What did I tell you? You ever eaten a bouillabaisse as good as that? You’ve got a wonderful smile. I’m sure you’ve been told that a hundred times before. Nevertheless, you should hear it again. A wonderful smile and wonderful eyes.

  “Sorry. Back to business. Sorry. No, why am I apologising? It is a lovely smile. And you should be told it is. Michael didn’t even mention Petrova in our phone calls. That’s how I knew he was still hurting. It was the most deafening aspect of those calls, the silence around Petrova. Thinking about it, that was probably the most resonant aspect of all. Michael normally didn’t call unless he was okay.