“Let me make myself clear here: If there were something up with you, if there were some crisis in your life, Michael was on the phone at least daily. You almost sensed he thrived on it. He was waiting by the telephone, you sensed, waiting like a wolf for a wounded moose to happen by. And when it did, he would pounce. Very concerned, very counselly – and, fairly often, very condescending. As if problems could only be solved – problems could only be voiced – if he were the other end of a telephone. A sort of emotional Sherlock Holmes, if you will.
“But if there was nothing happening to you, even if big things were happening to him, months could go by without his ever making a call. A lot of months.
“At that time, I remember, he had to talk about nothing. Petrova was a taboo subject. I don’t think he would have seen it in those terms. I’m sure he wouldn’t, in fact. I’m sure he would indeed have vehemently denied it had it been described in those terms. But, de facto, that was what she was. And it was almost as if that had given license for taboo to be hung around the neck of any other subject likely to upset him.
“It took him three calls, for instance, to mention that his grandson had been born: Franklyn Edward. And it only emerged during the reply to ‘how’s the family?’. ‘Fine,’ he said. ‘Just fine. ‘Course Jane’s …’ – Jane, that was his daughter-in-law – ‘… Jane’s getting a bit tired. Franklyn’s not sleeping too well at night. ‘Course I told her …’
“‘Whoa,’ I said. ‘Hold your horses there, Michael, a moment. Franklyn? I take it you’re now a grandfather.’
“‘Did I not tell you?’ he asked.
“It was almost the more he cared the less he was able to talk about it.”
+++
Maison d’arrêt de Toulouse-Seysses, 7th May 06
Dear Mom and Dad:
I’m really glad that both you (Mom) and Lassie are so much better. It’s hard enough to imagine you (Dad) as Dr Kildare. As James Herriot ... no, it’s too much.
The news from here isn’t, I’m afraid, too great. My attorney(s) had been hoping (as you know) that the prosecution might drop the murder charge. But they won’t. Bit of a blow. Still … The rather more cheerful news is that (most of) the team remains confident they can get me acquitted – at least, of that! I’d like to be acquitted of murder, I must say. And not just because that’s likely to be reflected in the sentence.
The other bit of good news is that my French is improving by leaps and bounds. I kept threatening – remember – to go to college. I suppose one way of looking at this, is that it’s a rather severe English-type boarding school. Offering some sort of crash course in some sort of French. (Though the French it is, frankly, I’m not sure would be welcomed in the more prissy of the Paris salons!)
The food, as you might expect, is really pretty good. And the prison officers, as you might also expect, are Frenchly officious. The French have always found joy in being arrogant towards Americans. Imagine then their glee that they can be so (oh, and how they can be ‘so’!) not only with impunity, but with official sanction!
The thing that most gets to me? That the pace is so petty which so creeps on from day to day.
I’ve been thinking of contacting Trove. What do you think?
Keep care of yourselves and each other. Stroke Lassie for me.
Your loving son – Al.
+++
“Mike had talked to me. That was his greatest gift to me. And also his greatest non-gift or un-gift or whatever it is the opposite of gift.
“Wham! That hit me too like a sledge-hammer. Sitting on that couch. Stroking the cat. Al and me, we hadn’t talked. Wham! We didn’t talk.
“Do you know? I don’t think we ever talked. Not ever. And I couldn’t face that. I was so open, for Christ’s sake. I’d been into therapy. Shit, I told you that. We had been. Together. I’d poured my heart out at therapy sessions – I told you that too. Then I’d come home and poured my heart out all over again. Or another heart out. A sort of heart extension – it was that I poured out when I got home. There was nothing – nothing – that I hadn’t told Al about me. Even when I was finding out about me. Even the bits of me I didn’t want to tell myself about, I told him. Even those bits I really didn’t like. No secrets. No holds barred – no holds, rather, unbarred. No part of my soul unbarred.
“If there had been that much talking going on, I told myself, we had to have been talking. We had to have been. It wasn’t possible for there not to have been.
“Wham! it hit me. WHAT?! That was exactly what had been happening – or not. I had been talking; we had not.
“I was Toad delivering a monologue. Worse, I was Toad in a whole bunch of ways delivering a monologue. ‘Poop, poop!’ I was in fact – ‘poop, poop!’ – Toad delivering his monologue in a whole bunch of ways I didn’t care for. Like Toad I was vain – vainglorious, even. Prompted by vanity, no, motivated, impelled by it, by vanity-glory, vaingloriousness, whatever. ‘Poop, poop.’ I suddenly saw, like Toad, that I wasn’t really too concerned about who was listening to me, whether anyone was. I was more interested in talking than being listened to, I guess is what I mean. I had spoken, I guess I also mean, and therefore I expected that I should have been heard.
“And Al had not spoken. I would, I reasoned, have listened to him had he spoken. Do you know, now I’m not so sure?”
+++
My dearest Trove,
It’s odd: It was you who wanted me to start this damn writing practice; you’re no longer on the scene; and yet I still don’t seem able to break myself of the habit. Why is that, do you suppose?
And I write to you, even knowing that it is not to you that I write. There is no realistic prospect of you ever seeing these words, let alone reacting to them – one way or another. And yet, it’s this simple: If I don’t write to you, then I will not write. There’s no-one else I feel a need to talk to. Hold on, let me think about that. No, that’s not it, not exactly. It’s more like, there’s no-one else I want to know about me. Not in this kind of way, nor in this kind of depth.
No, that’s not true either. I’ve been writing also to Drew. I’d like him also to know me better – to know me at all would be okay. And I’ve tried to be open with him. I’ve probably been far too open. I really don’t know any longer. I’m groping my way through a dark and slimy tunnel. I keep coming across, like, Piccadilly Circus-like underground stations and I simply flounder, not knowing which exit to take, not even knowing which exit I have taken. Not having the faintest idea which direction I’m headed in, or why. Or whether it’s the right direction or not. I suppose I’m bound to make some navigational mistakes. And if it’s only me who gets wounded by them, that’s okay. But it rarely is. And that’s less okay.
I accepted a long time ago that our abilities to shield those we love from their own pain is severely limited. There’s still a vast difference between that and causing them pain.
Oh Christ, Trove, you know all of this. And I know you know all of this. What the hell am I blathering on about?
There was the time in Oslo – I wonder if you remember: We’d just returned from having that magnificent sea-food dinner on the fjord there by the town hall, and we’d just made love – or were just making love – for the gazillionth time of that trip, and I told you I wanted you to fuck me. I meant figuratively. But you thought I meant actually and you also thought therefore I was joking. And I got too scared of being pompous or talking symbollocks, so I changed the subject. With despatch. I wanted you inside me, is what I meant. I wanted you to know me as no-one else had, from the inside out.
An Eskimo must get tired of ice-blocks, don’t you think? I mean, day after day, chopping up new ice-blocks, building an igloo. Day after day after day. He must yearn, wouldn’t you imagine, for some clay bricks or some lengths of timber – anything to give him some respite from bloody blocks of ice? Well, I’m a bit like that these days with secrets. I’ve igloo’d myself in secrets for too many years. It may be a good way to ward off polar bears,
but it gets very lonely inside that igloo – and as cold as hell. Which is quite enough about igloos! The analogy wasn’t working very well anyway.
Because most of my secrets I have kept secret even from myself – and it is that, the thing I find most tiresome of all. Oh, mostly I’ve trained myself out of lying to myself. That was hard work. But that is just ridiculous. It’s like cheating, isn’t it, at ‘Patience’? At ‘Solitaire’, as you would call it. What on earth’s the point? I was amazed how hard it was to break myself of the habit, how engrained it had become. But I did think … Well, when I gave up smoking, I didn’t want to find – I would have been really pissed off to find – that my smoking had concealed another addiction to, I don’t know, chewing tobacco, let’s say. But that was precisely what I did discover when I stopped myself from lying to myself: I found out then I had secrets from myself. Secrets not even I knew about – or even, for Christ’s sake, know about. Secrets that would be revealed to me by circumstance or coincidence; secrets which I could now understand were secrets because now they were no longer being veiled by the lies I told myself.
One secret I had was that, fundamentally, I was a kind person; but another secret I had was that, even more fundamentally, I was in need of being recognised as one. I was an Alan Ladd, in other words – certainly valiant, but driven less by the need of the moment or by the welfare of his colleagues, and more by the hankering after a medal. Nothing too virtuous in that.
+++
“Hi.”
“Trove?”
“You sound surprised.”
“I am.”
“Nice surprised …?”
“Or?”
“I don’t want to ask ‘or?’.”
“Nicely surprised, Trove.”
“How have you been keeping?”
“Oh … you know.”
“Comme ci, comme ça? “More ‘ça’, than ‘ci’.”
“Same. I told Al about us, Mike.”
“Right.”
“I felt I had to.”
“Yes, I thought probably you would feel that.”
“You don’t hate me, Mike?”
“Would you like me to?”
“No.”
“How did he take it?”
“He said, he figured it had to be something like that.”
“Well, it did have to be, didn’t it?”
“It’s twenty-three years, Mike.”
“I know.”
“Twenty-three years, and all he could say was that he figured
it had to be something like that.”
“What were you expecting, honey?”
“You called me ‘honey’, Mike.”
“What were you expecting?”
“You never answered if you hated me.”
“It was a silly question.”
“You called me ‘honey’.”
“Trove, what were you expecting?”
“Oh, I don’t know, after twenty something years, a reaction might’ve been nice.”
“I’m not sure, Trove, that ‘nice’ was available to him.”
“Excuse me?”
“Sorry.”
“‘Nice’ wasn’t available to him?”
“I’m sorry, Trove.”
“Maybe you should go and fuck Al.”
“I trod on a corn, Trove. And I apologised. I didn’t break your leg.”
“No.”
“You’re hurting. It’s okay to hurt.”
“And you?”
“You know I’m hurting.”
“We’re hurting each other, right?”
“Breaking the first condition. That was the first condition, right?”
“The second, hon, was that I wouldn’t leave Al.”
“You haven’t left Al.”
“For the most part, I have. The physical move, that won’t be long.”
“I didn’t want us, Trove, to split.”
“That was kind of tactless.”
“Sorry.”
“Not the act of an English gentleman.”
“You told me to stop all that.”
“I did?”
“Opening doors, helping you on with your jacket.”
“Why, of all things to believe I meant, Mike, did you choose to believe in that one?”
“I also believed it when you said we were through.”
“Did you?”
“No.”
“Hey, that was a real long pause, Mike.”
“A pregnant pause?”
“I think it miscarried.”
“That’d explain the blood on the floor.”
“Would it, Mike?”
“No.”
“Do you believe that, Mike?”
“That we’re through?”
“Yeah.”
“No. No, I don’t.”
“I love you, Mike.”
“I love you too, honey.”
Chapter 9
“Kiss me, Mike.”
“You smell of peanut butter.”
“What?” “Very pungent smell, Trove, peanut butter.”
“Four months ago would that have stopped you kissing me?”
“You’d have to ask me that four months ago.”
“Think about it.”
“Four months ago, Trove, would you have eaten peanut butter?”
“I always eat peanut butter.”
“Right before you were going to kiss me?”
“That’s not the same point.”
“Think about it.”
“Do you like your Limoges Troved, Mike?”
“I can’t imagine another kind of Limoges.”
“It’s lousy, the peanut butter, by the way. I thought you’d like to know.”
“I’ll write a letter of protest to ‘The Times’.”
“Better, no?, ‘Le Monde’. I want you to want to be here, Mike.”
“I do want that.”
“I need you, Mike, to want to be here.”
“I already said I want to be here.”
“I’ve become needy.”
“We’re all needy, Trove.”
“I don’t like it, my neediness. I hear myself whining from time to time.”
“You don’t whine to me.”
“I whine about you, Mike. That’s almost as bad. Whine about missing you. Neediness, see?”
“I miss you too.”
“And you whine?”
“Constantly.”
“Who to?”
“Who, Trove, do you whine to?”
“I have an army of girlfriends, Mike. Confidantes. Men friends too. Less now than I had. Friends don’t like to be whined at.”
“Then they’re not friends.”
“Yes, they are.”
“Not true friends.”
“Yes, Mike. There’s this strange perception … some woman sometime in history lifted a juggernaut off her child crushed beneath its wheels. Now, anyone who can’t lift juggernauts is not fit for motherhood.”
“Okay.”
“Not everyone, Mike, is an emotional Superman … or -woman. Most of us, you know, we’re carrying too much emotional crap, too much ballast, to be able to fly.”
“They don’t have to fly, Trove, true friends, they merely have to listen.”
“Listening, to a lot of people, is as hard as flying.”
“You’re very tolerant all of a sudden.”
“It’s because we’re talking in the abstract, hon.”
“That does make things easier, yes.”
“Face-to-face, they drive me crazy. Why don’t they listen?, I want to say.”
“Right.”
“Why won’t they listen?”
“Right.”
“Why don’t you, Mike?”
“What?”
“We don’t have sex like we used to. You don’t listen.”
“You think?”
“The sex is a shame. I miss it. Miss the intensity and the … ardour, I guess. Miss even the soreness. But that was
predictable. Inevitable, in fact. But the listening? No, Mike, that’s not inevitable. I need that listening, Mike. I need the intensity of our first listenings together, need that ardour. I warned you about my neediness.”
“You did?”
“Am I whining now?”
“Oh yes.”
+++
“Digestif of some sort? A cognac, perhaps? How about an armagnac?
“Poire William? I’ve no idea. I can ask. You’re not dashing somewhere, are you? I mean, we can take our time, can we? Enjoy a drink together, stroll back leisurely?
“Good.
“About that sort of time Petrova moved out of the house. When I say ‘house’, I believe the legal term is ‘matrimonial home’. She rented a place. Outside, if I remember correctly, Limoges. Mike, I seem to remember, visited her there. He was still living with Drew. Still somewhere near Nottingham: that’s somewhere near where Robin Hood used to live. No, what am I talking about? She didn’t rent it at all. No, that’s right, it was a ‘gite’ they’d bought, an investment. Used to rent it out for the summer, that sort of idea.
And, from what I can gather, it was also about that sort of time that Al started drinking. I never really knew him. But I recognised him. He was very recognisable. He always wore that absurd fedora which, absurdly, rather suited him. In a cup final crowd you’d spot Al – spot that red fedora. The whole of Toulouse, I’d venture to suggest, knew that fedora. It’s almost as famous locally as he is.
“And, not that I’ve spoken to too many people about it, but I’d put money on the fact that the whole of Toulouse had never seen that fedora in an otherwise than upright position. I’m trying to say that I don’t think anyone had seen Al drunk.
“Suddenly, that fedora was not strutting about town, but lurching.”
+++
Maison d’arrêt de Toulouse-Seysses, 12th May 06
Dear Trove:
I would like to write to you. I would completely understand if you preferred me not to. Reply to me only if I may write back. Otherwise, may God keep and protect you. – Al.
Al's Well Page 12
