The Portable Virgin

by Anne Enright

  When I was a child it was carpet I loved. I should have made a career in floor-coverings. There was a brown carpet in the dining room with specks of black, that was my parents’ pride and joy. ‘Watch the carpet!’ they would say, and I did. I spent all my time sitting on it, joining up the warm, black dots. Things mean a lot to me.

  The stench of molten rubber gives me palpitations. It also gives me eczema and a bad cough. My husband finds the smell anaphrodisiac in the extreme. Not even the products excite him, because after seven years you don’t know who you are touching, or not touching, anymore.

  My husband is called Malachy and I used to like him a lot. He was unfaithful to me in that casual, ‘look, it didn’t mean anything’ kind of way. I was of course bewildered, because that is how I was brought up. I am supposed to be bewildered. I am supposed to say ‘What is love anyway? What is sex?’

  Once the fiction between two people snaps then anything goes, or so they say. But it wasn’t my marriage I wanted to save, it was myself. My head, you see, is a balloon on a string, my insides are elastic. I have to keep the tension between what is outside and what is in, if I am not to deflate, or explode.

  So it was more than a suburban solution that made me want to be unfaithful with my husband, rather than against him. It was more than a question of the mortgage. I had my needs too: a need to be held in, to be filled, a need for sensation. I wanted revenge and balance. I wanted an awfulness of my own. Of course it was also suburban. Do you really want to know our sexual grief? How we lose our grip, how we feel obliged to wear things, how we are supposed to look as if we mean it.

  Malachy and I laugh in bed, that is how we get over the problem of conviction. We laugh at breakfast too, on a good day, and sometimes we laugh again at dinner. Honest enough laughter, I would say, if the two words were in the same language, which I doubt. Here is one of the conversations that led to the ad in the personals:

  *

  ‘I think we’re still good in bed.’ (LAUGH)

  ‘I think we’re great in bed.’ (LAUGH)

  ‘I think we should advertise.’ (LAUGH)

  Here is another:

  ‘You know John Jo at work? Well his wife was thirty-one yesterday. I said. “What did you give her for her birthday then?” He said, “I gave her one for every year. Beats blowing out candles.” Do you believe that?’ (LAUGH)

  You may ask when did the joking stop and the moment of truth arrive? As if you didn’t know how lonely living with someone can be.

  The actual piece of paper with the print on is of very little importance. John Jo composed the ad for a joke during a coffee-break at work. My husband tried to snatch it away from him. There was a chase.

  There was a similar chase a week later when Malachy brought the magazine home to me. I shrieked. I rolled it up and belted him over the head. I ran after him with a cup full of water and drenched his shirt. There was a great feeling of relief, followed by some very honest sex. I said, ‘I wonder what the letters will say?’ I said, ‘What kind of couples do that kind of thing? What kind of people answer ads like that?’ I also said ‘God how vile!’

  Some of the letters had photos attached. ‘This is my wife.’ Nothing is incomprehensible, when you know that life is sad. I answered one for a joke. I said to Malachy ‘Guess who’s coming to dinner?’

  I started off with mackerel pâté, mackerel being a scavenger fish, and good for the heart. I followed with veal osso buco, for reasons I need not elaborate, and finished with a spiced fig pudding with rum butter. Both the eggs I cracked had double yolks, which I found poignant.

  I hoovered everything in sight of course. Our bedroom is stranger-proof. It is the kind of bedroom you could die in and not worry about the undertakers. The carpet is a little more interesting than beige, the spread is an ochre brown, the pattern on the curtains is expensive and unashamed. One wall is mirrored in a sanitary kind of way; with little handles for the wardrobe doors.

  ‘Ding Dong,’ said the doorbell. Malachy let them in. I heard the sound of coats being taken and drinks offered. I took off my apron, paused at the mirror and opened the kitchen door.

  Her hair was over-worked, I thought – too much perm and too much gel. Her make-up was shiny, her eyes were small. All her intelligence was in her mouth, which gave an ironic twist as she said Hello. It was a large mouth, sexy and selfish. Malachy was holding out a gin and tonic for her in a useless kind of way.

  Her husband was concentrating on the ice in his glass. His suit was a green so dark it looked black – very discreet, I thought, and out of our league, with Malachy in his cheap polo and jeans. I didn’t want to look at his face, nor he at mine. In the slight crash of our glances I saw that he was worn before his time.

  I think he was an alcoholic. He drank his way through the meal and was polite. There was a feeling that he was pulling back from viciousness. Malachy, on the other hand, was over-familiar. He and the wife laughed at bad jokes and their feet were confused under the table. The husband asked me about my job and I told him about the machine I have for testing rubber squares; how it pulls the rubber four different ways at high speed. I made it sound like a joke, or something. He laughed.

  *

  I realised in myself a slow, physical excitement, a kind of pornographic panic. It felt like the house was full of balloons pressing gently against the ceiling. I looked at the husband.

  ‘Is this your first time?’

  ‘No,’ he said.

  ‘What kind of people do this kind of thing?’ I asked, because I honestly didn’t know.

  ‘Well they usually don’t feed us so well, or even at all.’ I felt guilty. ‘This is much more civilised,’ he said. ‘A lot of them would be well on before we arrive, I’d say. As a general kind of rule.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I said, ‘I don’t really drink.’

  ‘Listen,’ he leaned forward. ‘I was sitting having a G and T in someone’s front room and the wife took Maria upstairs to look at the bloody grouting in the bathroom or something, when this guy comes over to me and I realise about six minutes too late that he plays for bloody Arsenal! If you see what I mean. A very ordinary looking guy.’

  ‘You have to be careful,’ he said. ‘And his wife was a cracker.’

  When I was a child I used to stare at things as though they knew something I did not. I used to put them into my mouth and chew them to find out what it was. I kept three things under my bed at night: a piece of wood, a metal door-handle and a cloth. I sucked them instead of my thumb.

  We climbed the stairs after Malachy and the wife, who were laughing. Malachy was away, I couldn’t touch him. He had the same look in his eye as when he came home from a hurling match when the right team won.

  The husband was talking in a low, constant voice that I couldn’t refuse. I remember looking at the carpet, which had once meant so much to me. Everyone seemed to know what they were doing.

  I thought that we were all supposed to end up together and perform and watch and all that kind of thing. I was interested in the power it would give me over breakfast, but I wasn’t looking forward to the confusion. I find it difficult enough to arrange myself around one set of limbs, which are heavy things. I wouldn’t know what to do with three. Maybe we would get over the awkwardness with a laugh or two, but in my heart of hearts I didn’t find the idea of being with a naked woman funny. What would we joke about? Would we be expected to do things?

  What I really wanted to see was Malachy’s infidelity. I wanted his paunch made public, the look on his face, his bottom in the air. That would be funny.

  I did not expect to be led down the hall and into the spare room. I did not expect to find myself sitting on my own with an alcoholic and handsome stranger who had a vicious look in his eye. I did not expect to feel anything.

  I wanted him to kiss me. He leant over and tried to take off his shoes. He said, ‘God I hate that woman. Did you see her? The way she was laughing and all that bloody lip-gloss. Did you see her? She looks like
she’s made out of plastic. I can’t get a hold of her without slipping around in some body lotion that smells like petrol and dead animals.’ He had taken his shoes off and was swinging his legs onto the bed. ‘She never changes you know.’ He was trying to take his trousers off. ‘Oh I know she’s sexy. I mean, you saw her. She is sexy. She is sexy. She is sexy. I just prefer if somebody else does it. If you don’t mind.’ I still wanted him to kiss me. There was the sound of laughter from the other room.

  I rolled off the wet patch and lay down on the floor with my cheek on the carpet, which was warm and rough and friendly. I should go into floor-coverings.

  *

  I remember when I wet the bed as a child. First it is warm then it gets cold. I would go into my parents’ bedroom, with its smell, and start to cry. My mother gets up. She is half-asleep but she’s not cross. She is huge. She strips the bed of the wet sheet and takes off the rubber under-blanket which falls with a thick sound to the floor. She puts a layer of newspaper on the mattress and pulls down the other sheet. She tells me to take off my wet pyjamas. I sleep in the raw between the top sheet and the rough blanket and when I turn over, all the warm newspaper under me makes a noise.

  Liking

  ‘I’LL TELL YOU what happened now, not an hour past. A young girl was sitting in that seat there I’ll tell you who it was in a minute, having a glass after her shopping. And she got up to go. She wasn’t out of the place when she let a scream out of her and the bags of shopping dropped to the ground and in she comes to me and “Johnny, Johnny come quick there’s something down on the beach.” So I went, and right enough there was something on the beach alright, and it looked like an old dog or a sheep, like an old dog or a sheep.’

  ‘He did.’

  ‘Like an old dog or a sheep.’

  ‘How many days is that now?

  ‘He went the twenty-one days. I got an awful shock.’

  ‘He went the twenty-one.’

  ‘He was all blown.’

  ‘He was, of course.’

  ‘I tell you. He had a head on him alright. But no face.’

  ‘He did not.’

  ‘He had his socks on. And the sergeant trying to put him in a bag.’

  ‘Don’t tell me now.’

  ‘The sergeant trying to hold on to something.’

  ‘How would you like it, how would you like it, if you were standing talking to a man in a bar in London, as far away from me as you are now? How would you like it, if you said “I’ll see you tomorrow so,” and he said, “I’ll see you, Jim, good luck”? How would you like it if he walked out that door, and got the head taken off him with the clip of a truck?’

  ‘He did. And how would you like it if you saw O’Neill on the beach? Because I’ve told you something, but I haven’t told you the whole truth.’

  ‘Don’t tell me now.’

  ‘I won’t so.’

  ‘I saw him only a week now before he went, walking down the street, and Oh he looked bad. He looked very bad.’

  ‘He did.’

  ‘He was living where? He was living over on the head.’

  ‘He had a woman sure in the house with him. She wasn’t from the same family now, but he was living with her all the same. You know he was in the bed with her one night. You know that. You know he was in the bed with her, and she wasn’t having any of that tomfoolery and you know he went into the kitchen and up with a knife and whipped off the whole shooting gallery there in front of her. You know that.’

  ‘He did.’

  ‘The whole shooting works. And that’s what I saw.’

  ‘You did.’

  ‘How do you like that?’

  ‘Did you ever see a man with a buck rake through his neck?’

  The House of the Architect’s Love Story

  I USED TO drink to bring the house down, just because I saw a few cracks in the wall. But Truth is not an earthquake, it is only a crack in the wall and the house might stand for another hundred years.

  ‘Let it come down,’ I would say, perhaps a little too loudly. ‘Let it come down.’ The others knew what I meant alright, but the house stayed still.

  I gave all that up. We each have our methods. I am good at interior decoration. I have a gin and tonic before dinner and look at the wallpaper. I am only drunk where it is appropriate. I am only in love where it stays still. This does not mean that I am polite.

  Three years ago I hit a nurse in the labour ward, because I had the excuse. I make housewife noises in the dark, to make your skin crawl. I am glad he has given me a child, so I can drown it, to show the fullness of my intent.

  I boast, of course.

  Of all the different love stories, I chose an architect’s love story, with strong columns and calculated lines of stress, a witty doorway and curious steps. In the house of an architect’s love story the light is always moving, the air is thick with light. From outside, the house of the architect’s love story is a neo-Palladian villa, but inside, there are corners, cellars, attics, toilets, a room full of books with an empty socket in the lamp. There are cubbyholes that smell of wet afternoons. There are vaults, a sacristy, an office with windows set in the floor. There is a sky-blue nursery where the rocking-horse is shaped like a bat and swings from a rail. And in the centre of it all is a bay window where the sun pours in.

  It is familiar to us all. At least, it was familiar to me, the first time I walked in, because all my dreams were there, and there were plenty of cracks in the wall.

  The first time I didn’t sleep with the architect was purely social. We were at a party to celebrate a friend’s new extension. There had been connections, before that, of course, we were both part of the same set. If I ever wanted an extension, I would have come to him myself.

  I asked him about terracotta tiling and we discussed the word ‘grout’. I was annoyed by the faint amusement in his face when I said that white was the only colour for a bathroom sink. ‘I am the perfect Architect,’ he said, ‘I have no personal taste. I only look amused to please my clients, who expect to be in the wrong.’ There was a mild regret in his voice for all the cathedrals he should have built and we talked about that for a while.

  The second time I didn’t sleep with the architect was in my own house. I shouldn’t have invited him, but the guilt was very strong. I wanted him to meet my husband and go away quietly, but he spent the time pacing the room, testing the slope of the floor. He knocked on the walls too, to see which were partitions, sniffed slightly in front of my favourite picture and told me the bedroom was a mistake. ‘I know what you mean,’ I said, and then backed away. I said that I could live in a hole at the side of the road, so long as it was warm. ‘Do you ever think of anything,’ I asked, ‘except dry rot?’ We were perfectly at home with one another. Even so, there were many occasions in that first year when we did not make love.

  The reasons for this neglect were profound, and not to be confused with an absence of desire. The architect and I had both built our lives with much deliberation. The need to abandon everything, to ‘let it come down’ had been mislaid long ago. We understood risk too well. We needed it too much. There was also the small matter of my husband and a child.

  It is a quiet child with red hair. It is past the boring stage and runs around from room to room, taking up my time. It would be a mistake to say that I loved her. I am that child. When she looks at me I feel vicious, the need between us is so complete, and I feel vicious for the world, because it threatens the head that I love. On the other hand, wives that are faithful to their husbands because they are infatuated by their offspring don’t make sense to me. One doesn’t have sex with one’s children.

  I am unfaithful with my husband’s money – a much more pleasant occupation. My life is awash with plumbers and electricians, and I change all the ashtrays twice a year. I watch women in fitting rooms, the way they stick their lips out and make them ugly when they look into the mirror. I wonder who they are dressing for and I wonder who pays.

  My husban
d earns forty thousand pounds a year and has a company car. This is one of the first things he ever told me. But I fell in love with him anyway.

  After I hadn’t slept with the architect a few times, I took to riding buses as though they were the subways of New York. I sighed when the air-brakes loosened their sad load, and sat at the front, up-top, where I could drive with no hands. I became addicted to escalators, like a woman in a nervous breakdown. Stairs were for sitting on, with my child in my lap. I joined the local library for that purpose.

  These were all things I dreamed about long before I met the architect, which makes this story dishonest in its way. Under excuses for sitting on library steps I could also list: simple fatigue, not winning the lottery, not liking the colour blue. Under excuses for killing babies I could list: not liking babies, not liking myself, or not liking the architect. Take your pick.

  I don’t mean to sound cold. These are thing I have to say slowly, things I have to pace the room for, testing the slope in the floor. So. The architect is called Paul, if you must know. His parents called him Paul because they were the kind of people who couldn’t decide on the right wallpaper. Paul has a mind as big as a house, a heart the size of a door and a dick you could hang your hat on. He never married; being too choosy, too hesitant, too mindful of the importance of things.

  I wanted to function in and around his breakfast. I wanted to feel panic and weight. There was the usual thing about his smell, and where I wanted that. (I felt his body hard against me. His eyes opened so slowly, I thought he was in pain. ‘Oh Sylvia,’ his breath was a whisper, a promise against my skin. The green flame of his eye licked my mouth, my neck, my breast.) But I’m sounding cold again. The architect’s smell would have spiralled out from me to fill uncountable cubic feet. I loved him.

  Not sleeping with the architect helped my marriage quite a bit. I discovered all kinds of corners in my husband, and little gardens in his head. I was immensely aware of how valuable he was as a human being, the presence he held in a room, the goodness with which he had given me his life, his salary and his company car. I was grateful for the fact that he still kissed for hours, as though the cycle of our sex lives was not complete. (Sex with my architect would have been horribly frank, nothing to say and nothing to hide.)