Peter couldn’t help it; the mental plumbers had never shown up. “Begging your pardon, sir. With all due respect, sir. This is not your house. This is a public airport, sir.”
So that was that. Allowed to scoop up his Kleenex, his to-do list, his ChapStick, his Tylenol, Peter was issued off to the little white room.
In the Islamic State not long before, several women of Raqqa had been whipped for cladding themselves in abayas that were too tight and wearing Western makeup. But more than one immodest captive was given five extra lashes for “not being meek enough when detained.”
Thus any agitation, or even the very fraudulent deference of which TSA agents themselves were masters, had now given way to a rueful, solitary repose.
Holding the specimen between thumb and middle finger, Peter Dimmock contemplated the source of his undoing. The ChapStick was the original kind, whose black-and-white wrapper had not changed appreciably in his lifetime. He never bought the brand’s more innovative lip balms—not even tame variants like spearmint and strawberry, much less candy cane, or cake batter—because his father always used the original flavor, and he liked the smell. Peter associated that almost medical waxy plainness with his boyhood, when Dod was still “Father,” and would lean down and smack his youngest on the cheek, leaving an invisible smear. He never wiped it off. It emanated a residual waft of unadorned masculinity, of a piece with his father’s folded, freshly laundered cotton handkerchiefs, starched white shirt collars, and cool-blue-mint breath. Self-respecting men of Daniel Dimmock’s generation would never be caught dead with cake batter lip balm.
Older and rechristened, Dod stopped kissing his sons, settling for a shoulder clap, or a handshake once they were grown. Thus Peter associated the smell of that original-flavor ChapStick with the unabashed adoration of a little boy, not yet compromised by the curse of mature clear-sightedness. If only because it was one of the sole props in his possession—they said they’d retrieve his tablet, coats, and carry-on, but no one seemed in any hurry—he ran the balm around his lips, which were dry. The smell was the same, and recalled his father in sharp relief, with a rush of affection this time, and then he knew he would never wish to launch into a harangue at the poor man’s bedside about how the Dimmock Shunt was obsolete.
The officer who eventually grilled him about “making a scene” in airport security, “refusing to obey an officer’s instructions” (flagrantly untrue), “flying into a rage” (TSA-speak for becoming mildly irked) and “endangering his fellow passengers” was visible for half an hour through the crack of the office door, exuding that time-killing idleness that in an earlier era would have expressed itself with a cigarette. Foolishly, Peter had committed the one unforgivable crime in the world of air travel—which wasn’t, of course, holding a box cutter to a flight attendant’s throat, but having a bad attitude—for which he had to be made an example, lest other fliers come to imagine that they were within their rights to get annoyed. Thus this wait was deliberate, its length carefully calculated to make him miss his plane.
Peter was raised in a family that taught him a great deal about power, especially about not having any—which should have been ideal training for flying from any airport in America in the twenty-first century. TSA agents were deputized with the kind of petty power that was especially horrifying because it wasn’t really petty. They could ensure that you would be a no-show at a lecture you’d been engaged to give all year, damaging your professional reputation and having what would have been a lucrative honorarium withdrawn. They could make you sacrifice your hotel deposit or miss your own wedding. They could keep you from being present at the birth of your grandchildren. And they could most certainly guarantee that you would not see your father one last time before he died.
Negative Equity
The Landers’ predicament came home to them when they decided to divorce and then nothing happened.
Graham must have been working himself up to the scene for weeks. With sympathy born of habit and temperament alike, Rosalind felt sorry for him; why, no wonder that for the last several evenings he’d come home from the restaurant feeling ill. In the end, it was a relief for them both. The decision to dissolve a marriage of nine years’ standing made for a warmer, sweeter evening than they’d conducted in months.
“I don’t quite know how to say this,” he’d begun, and even in this declaration of inarticulacy Rosalind detected rehearsal. “I don’t want you to think there’s someone else. There isn’t.”
“Who isn’t someone else?” Honestly, she was trying to help.
They were sitting at the ample rough-hewn table made from a barn door that so many dinner guests of yore had envied. Alongside, a generous six-foot prep table divided the dining area from the kitchen she’d always pined for, with cast iron dangling from the ceiling, slate flooring, funky lines of mismatched spice jars, and retro tomato tins brambling with spatulas and tenderizers. The triple-glazed skylights that Graham had special ordered and the french doors onto their long, lush garden would welcome fierce shafts of sunlight in the morning; at well past midnight, the open-plan ground floor glowed quietly from an array of inset down-lights on a dimmer switch. It was a beautiful house. Whatever the property websites claimed, this semidetached Georgian freehold was no less fetching than it had been a year before.
“It just shouldn’t be possible!” Graham burst out opaquely. She sensed this presentation was already muddled, as if his mental PowerPoint had frozen. “See, one of the waitresses—”
“Which one?” Way ahead of him, Rosalind sifted through the possibilities. In the “credit crunch”—a newsreader thumbnail that made the misery of millions sound like a chocolate bar—Graham’s cozy city-center bistro Say La Vie had already let one waitress go. Of the remaining three, one was a cow, the other over sixty. How hard was it?
“It doesn’t matter which one. We haven’t done anything. We haven’t had an affair.”
He insisted that he didn’t want to leave his wife for Chantelle, a willowy, athletic blond a decade his junior whom he persistently refused to name. But for even his eyes to stray, he said, his passion for Rosalind must have waned. Whether she believed him that there’d been no quickies in the pantry was of no importance. He wanted a divorce, and it really didn’t matter if an ex-husband was a liar.
Rosalind would enjoy plenty of leisure to contemplate the nature of the worm in their marriage. To indulge Graham’s dream of starting Say La Vie five years earlier, she’d been game for moving to Sheffield, closer to Graham’s family, with an eye to having their own—though in current economic circumstances they’d put off a pregnancy yet another year. She got on better with his parents than with hers, and one could be a dental hygienist just about anywhere. Still, she missed the sense of possibility in London, and particular friends. Perhaps she’d been a little depressed. She didn’t feel depressed, but depression appeared to concern less what you did feel than what you didn’t.
Yet never mind the autopsy. They’d taken out a massive home equity loan when the restaurant’s clientele first began to flag. It had seemed to make sense; the loan might see them through the downturn, and the house had appreciated a staggering fifty percent. But now that the property market had sagged as well, they owed more on the house than it was worth. If they sold now, they’d be saddled with debt that would snuffle at both their heels for years like a scabby stray. Graham may have been suffering from workplace lechery or worse, but for the time being, like it or not, they were stuck with each other.
For the proceeding fortnight, Rosalind and Graham experienced a curious flowering of their relationship. They’d both sensed something amiss, and getting it out in the open shed the toxic buildup of the unsaid. As housemates rather than spouses, too, they were much more courteous—remembering to say please could you pick up some milk, thank you for doing my laundry as well, or sorry! when they bumped into each other in the hall. Rosalind took unusually careful phone messages—printing neatly, ears ever pricked for a voice that
sounded blond. As they fixed their separate breakfasts, Graham offered to boil an extra egg. She actually listened to him when he described that night’s specials, even suggesting that the celeriac mash might benefit from a dash of horseradish. He actually listened to her when she described scraping the tartar off a patient’s lower right molar the day before and having the tooth come out horrifyingly in her hand. Sticking to his story that he’d done nothing to be ashamed of, Graham insisted firmly that letting Rosalind stay in the master bedroom and moving his own things down the hall was driven by chivalry, not guilt. In all, the new politeness was shocking, since it emphasized the contrasting obliviousness and even rudeness into which the two had hitherto slipped. Rosalind knew she shouldn’t allow herself to misinterpret the transformation, but the fresh descent of kindness and consideration couldn’t help but get her hopes up a bit.
Meantime, while breathing through her mouth at the surgery to keep from recoiling from cases of chronic halitosis, naturally she pondered what had gone wrong. The difficulties with Say La Vie hadn’t helped. After only one exhausting year, Graham had confessed ruefully that if you really loved to cook, the last thing you should ever do is open a restaurant. She’d admired his candor, though he was not a quitter.
Yet in addition the couple seemed to have lost, well—a sense of occasion. Initially, they’d both made a fuss over each other’s birthdays, with piles of presents, many of them silly. Wedding anniversaries had sponsored a grand splurge, gloriously, at someone else’s restaurant. On their second Valentine’s Day together, Graham had lavished hours on a great heart-shaped onion tart, with tiny cutout pastry hearts scalloping its edge. Back in London they’d bought Christmas trees, one year decorating the fir with a culinary theme: whisks, egg slicers, and dangling wooden spoons. Stockings having been her favorite Yuletide ritual as a child, the woolen knee-highs they’d hung from the mantel in Kennington were as lumpy and bloated as the gout-ridden legs of a stout old man. Rosalind used to spend days finding droll trinkets for Graham’s stocking: garish candies in the shape of pizzas, hotdogs, and fried eggs; gadgets like mussel holders and strawberry hullers that he’d never use, but utility hadn’t been the point. Stockings were vessels for the small, the frivolous, and the tender.
What had happened? Boredom, practicality, and running dry of ideas. Birthdays had grown perfunctory. Rosalind might find him a package of Dalmatian-print boxers and not even bother to wrap it. Graham might find her something for the house—stainless-steel coasters to protect their beloved barn-door table—that was really for them both. Never mind a card, much less a tart, it was a miracle if either even remembered to say “Happy Valentine’s Day!” on February fourteenth. As for Christmas, proximity to Graham’s family had allowed them lazily to rely on her in-laws’ festivities. They’d given a tree a miss since moving to Sheffield; the needles made such a mess. Why, this last Christmas they bought the obligatory bits and bobs for Graham’s family, but made a pact to economize and skip buying presents for each other—the kind of pact you were meant secretly to break. Yet they’d kept their words! The problem wasn’t the loss of any one holiday or marker; it was collective. In failing to celebrate a host of small occasions, Rosalind and Graham had neglected to celebrate the biggest of occasions: their lives together, abruptly so truncated and finite.
The second honeymoon came to an end on a Monday, when Say La Vie was closed. Graham was out late, without explanation. He didn’t owe her explanations anymore, which didn’t keep Rosalind from waiting up and fretting.
“Where have you been?” she snapped when he walked in at two a.m.
“Well, I could say,” he said cautiously, “that’s none of your business.”
“Could say, or is that what you’re saying? Because if it isn’t, don’t say it!” The corners of her eyes leaked mean, aggrieved tears.
“Ros. I realize it doesn’t look like it, but we’re separated. If I want to go out to dinner, I don’t have to ask your permission.”
“You don’t even like going out to dinner! It’s been ‘demythologized,’ you said! Restaurants are a waste of money, and a real treat nowadays is to eat in!”
“I’ve also said,” he reminded her gently, “that the main thing you pay for isn’t food but venue. It’s like renting eight square feet of elsewhere for the night. Which, with our current arrangements, is exactly what I needed.”
“It’s that Chantelle, isn’t it?”
He didn’t deny it. She was inconsolable.
He shook his head. “This isn’t working. I’d get my own flat, but I’m not sure I could manage the rent, keep Say open, and still meet our mortgage payments. But I might manage to let a room …”
Rosalind got herself together, for she suddenly realized that the only way to keep him—and part of what she realized is that she wanted to keep him—was to keep him in this house. “No, no, even a room would bust our budget. I guess the only thing I can’t stand is secrecy. Being shut out. Obviously, you have every right … But since you do like nothing more than a night at home, next time … Well, why not bring her here?”
Thus the following Monday, Rosalind found herself enmeshed in what was lightly christened romantic comedy, something of an oxymoron in her view; nothing about romance had ever struck her as funny. When Graham rocked up with this Chantelle creature, Rosalind had prepared the dating couple a candlelit dinner. Begging off joining them, she declared gaily, “Just think of me as your waitress”—flicking her not-especially-estranged husband a wicked glance. Becoming the other woman in her own home was rather stimulating, really, and Rosalind didn’t, as she had feared, mope through the courses or fall into fits of weeping. Instead she was bright, witty, and hyperactive. Whisking around the prep island to lift dishes and condiments, she made a great show of graciousness in relation to Chantelle, asking where her family was from and where she’d gone to school.
“Of course, Say La Vie must be a ‘day job,’” she gushed warmly. “Have you thought about what you really want to do?”
Chantelle had begun the evening understandably guarded, answering Rosalind’s many merry questions formally and with few words. It was an odd situation, as they’d all agreed at the outset. Yet gradually the girl had relaxed, coming to find the circumstances a bit of a kick, and perhaps anticipating what a good story she’d have to share with girlfriends when they were binge-drinking at the weekend. She had that uninvested, dismissive nonchalance typical of her age. As a group, her Whatever Generation displayed a flip, arch airiness, as if apathy were a mark of sophistication. But Ros had seen plenty such girls come and go at the surgery, and soon enough they all developed adult-scale attachments. Life didn’t let you get away with being blasé for long, if only because everybody cares about pain. And Rosalind had to concede that, with long, swaying straight hair like a palomino’s mane and legs at which even another woman couldn’t help but stare, the young lady was fetching.
“Have you considered becoming a dental hygienist?” Ros proposed. “Now, I know it seems a turnoff at first. But if you work for a private dentist, the pay’s pretty good, and your day’s over at five sharp. You’re doing something important, and when you clean up some lad’s smile, that came in coffee gray and tobacco stained? You’ve made him a lot more confident about himself in just half an hour, and it’s surprisingly satisfying!”
Of course there was a subtext: You can train as a hygienist and then you can get married and buy a house and put your assets into a fledgling business, until your husband hires a waitress like you. Perhaps fortunately, Chantelle didn’t extrapolate quite this far, and when she said she’d consider the career, she seemed to mean it.
“Well, even if Chantelle and I don’t work out, at least you two will still be fast friends,” Graham said after he returned from driving the girl home; at twenty-four, Chantelle still lived with her mum. “I felt like a right third wheel.”
“Well, it’s obviously, you know, awkward,” Rosalind said, loading the dishwasher. “I was trying to set h
er at ease.”
“Went a bit overboard,” Graham reprimanded, though he was smiling.
“I wasn’t attempting to co-opt her or anything.”
“Oh, no? Always telling, what people say they’re not doing. Though I have to say”—Graham balanced an oatmeal cluster on a slice of peach—“with just the amount of clove so it’s strong but not dominating … Your crumble’s top drawer.”
It was inevitable, Rosalind supposed, that after the next Monday’s dinner those two would decamp to the guest room and close the door. If only to safeguard her dignity, when a patient was flirtatious the following week she lured him home. She hadn’t meant to start a contest, only to preserve her sense of herself as desirable and to restore a certain domestic balance. Let Graham find out what it was like to wake in his own house and have to make small talk with a total stranger who’d just shagged his spouse.
With Aiden, Graham was not himself given to Rosalind’s approach—football badinage, invitations to play golf, offers of complimentary glasses of champagne at Say. To the contrary, he was gruff and visibly put out. So the gambit worked splendidly—if gambit is what it was. What a shame, then, that Aiden’s halitosis had not cleared up after the cleaning, not even once he followed her advice to brush his tongue.
Yet with Christmas around the corner, it wouldn’t do to be seen drooping through the holiday pathetically on her own. Thus she kept up the pretense of seeing Aiden, claiming that, since Graham had been so horrid to her swain over kippers, they preferred her boyfriend’s flat. To explain her continued presence at breakfast, she paired an imaginary erotic tradition of preprandial passion with a truthful preference for waking in her own bed. Aping the jaunty liberation of a soon-to-be-divorcée discovering a whole new lease on life helped her in some measure to inhabit the role. Still, Graham’s trysts were real.
All too real as well were her visits to property websites, which left Rosalind increasingly dejected. A pretend boyfriend was no consolation in the harsh blue glare of the computer: The market in Sheffield was recovering. The value of their comely Georgian freehold would be going steadily back up.
Property Page 22
