“Has it ever worked the other way around?” I asked her. “You’ve convinced yourself out of something?”
She gave a startled laugh, then looked down and hesitated, for so long that I wondered if she was even going to answer. When she looked up her eyes, heavily framed, flamily lit, were impossible to interpret. “All the time,” she said.
Before I could understand her, or reply, she continued fresh and bright, as if sweeping away the earlier moment, “So what happened with you and Antonia?”
I remembered—unwillingly—the breakup with Antonia: the tarry atmosphere of conflict and failure like smoke; standing at the door, feeling its pinch in my airways. Antonia staring at me with tears in her eyes, saying, “How cold you are.” It was a thought I didn’t like to spend much time on; an unsmoothed, wrong thing of the past. I had thought Antonia and I understood each other, but the longer I knew her the less I knew her, starting in bed and moving back and back, until she was just a dark shape in the doorway, angry and indistinct.
“Actually, I don’t really know. We didn’t have a very close relationship. We didn’t talk much. I assumed we wanted the same things, from each other, I mean, but it turned out we didn’t.”
“I’m sorry,” she said.
“No—it’s not like that. She was the one who ended it, but it was probably my fault that it ended.” I thought for a while. “Yes . . . I’m fairly sure it was my fault.”
She laughed, then coughed, becoming serious, then started laughing again.
“Oh, Jonathan . . . sorry. I don’t mean to laugh at you.”
“It’s fine,” I said. She was still smiling at me, without looking away, and I felt the sudden sickness of hope in my stomach. “Shall we go back to a bar?”
“Why not?” she said.
When we left I picked up her bag, which had spilled a book out onto the floor. “What are you reading?” I asked.
“It’s about an artist who became famous but used his influence for the wrong ends. He genuinely thought he was improving things, though—making them better for his people.”
“Well, that was a mistake,” I said cheerfully, following her out into the evening. “Trying to help the general public.”
“Don’t you think that achievement should be at least partly about improving things for other people?” she asked.
“No. One feels achievement after a game of tennis,” I said, “but it doesn’t help anyone. It’s about the competition—about excelling. That’s what life is like.”
“I see,” she said, lowering her eyes. The silence welled up. I paused, and saw myself—standing there under the awning of the restaurant—arms crossed, foot tilted up importantly. I saw the palely tasteful shirt, blazer over the arm, wrist weighted by leaden, expensive watch. The clipped fingernails and attended-to teeth, the chestnut flex of the handmade shoes, hair not too long, not too short. Back straight. Face shut up like a shop, mouth moving tensely, shortly; saying something ridiculous.
“Maria—that’s wrong,” I said. “I don’t think that at all. Can we forget I said it?”
She looked back at me steadily, her hair unfurling from her collar like a flag in the wind, and smiled. She took my arm.
“Let’s go to the bar at my hotel.”
After the bar closed we took the unfinished wine bottle and went to her room, which was luxurious and subtle; drifting low light, the window broken up with rain, the counterpane swallowing our edges when we half sat, half lay on the bed. The night was a drowsy boat, holding us both, tranquil and easy and slightly drunk. I held our glasses as she switched through the films on the television.
“They’ve divided them into categories,” she said, “Love, sex, death. Which one do you want?”
“Love,” I said.
“I remember a conversation with you where you didn’t think there was any such thing,” she said lightly, taking her glass back.
“Well, I’ve changed my mind. I do think a lot of relationships don’t have much to do with love. But not all of them are that way.”
“Watch out, Jonathan . . . you’re getting dangerously soft and squishy. Like a marshmallow. Or a teddy.” She dabbed me on the arm like a cat, teasingly.
“It’s actually based on sound, scientific principles of observation,” I said.
“Oh—you’re researching the subject. So this was why you were asking me so many questions earlier? I’m a case study?”
“I asked because I didn’t know anything about you,” I said. “Like you said a long time ago.”
She stopped smiling and there was a pause. Her face was turned up to the ceiling, so that next to her I couldn’t see her full expression.
“You said I had a favorable impression of you,” I told her.
“I remember what I said.”
I tried to make out some feeling in the parts of her face I could see; the sweep of her cheek, the side of her nose, lashes—an unreadable levee, an occlusion. In the absence of speak-response I felt suddenly unhappy. It was something I kept sliding into, that miserable feeling: the second time that night, the hundredth time that week. I was so familiar with it I could see its shape: it was my apartment at night, a stack of paperwork, the clamor of the phone, the coldness of the sheets. I imagined myself going back there and I didn’t know if I could do it. Maria’s face, still turned away, reminded me of Antonia, who had absolutely nothing left for me. No more effort, no more goodwill.
“I’m not sure what I’m doing anymore,” I said to her. “I’m tired—I’m tired of myself.”
She twisted on the bed, so that we were looking at each other, but didn’t say anything.
“I’m meant to be building a brand-new hotel in the place of something old and beautiful. Is that what I do?” I said. “But . . . I can’t think of anything else I do. That’s it. All I am is a man who builds new things.”
“No,” she said, “that’s not true.”
She put out her hand across the space between us and touched mine, and a silence developed. Maria’s eyes did not move away from me; her mouth finally, unexpectedly, serious. I lay still and surprised in the moment—the sudden luxury of it—the lightness of her fingers evaporating like vapor off my skin. I felt that to do anything now would be wrong; no movement or sound to disturb the heavy humidity between us, the gathering charge. Neither of us spoke; neither of us looked away: and then her phone started to ring, and it was over.
I wondered who would call her now, at one o’clock in the morning, until I saw her expression—startled, then abashed—and I realized who it was: someone she had promised to call later when she got home, someone who had waited for the call and had started to wonder if maybe she had forgotten him or fallen asleep, and in the end decided to call her himself, because he had been looking forward to a late-night conversation with her and it would be too disappointing to just give up and go to bed. I would have done the same in his place.
“You’re seeing someone, aren’t you?” I said.
“Yes.”
“That’s him now.”
“Yes.”
She didn’t move to answer the phone, which rang out, but it left us in nothing but the emptiness of its not ringing, having taken its insistent scissor swipes to the perfect silence of before, cut it up into pieces. I sat up and she lay back and put her arm over her eyes, almost defensively, then took it away.
“It’s late—I’d better go,” I said. “I’m sorry to complain about things to you. That’s the problem with being a professional, I suppose . . . everyone wants a free consultation.”
She got up and followed me as I went around the room putting my jacket on, my shoes, reeling myself back in. She looked unsettled; and rightly so—how long had I been staring at her? I was drunk, that was the problem. I felt horribly close to crying.
“Jonathan,” she said, but then stopped, and by the time I got to the door something like her old politeness had drawn back over her, hiding her expression. She murmured something about talking soon, and I said
good night and left, hurrying down the hall, the blank noise of her door clicking shut behind me. Then I was out of the revolving hotel doors into the abruptness of the street, where I lifted the hand she had touched to my mouth, as if I might be able to bring it back, the complex smell of her skin; salt, caramel, the aftermath of perfume, the sun it had absorbed.
I knew I had to let her go, the idea of her. I counted up the years I had wanted her, to punish myself with the number. I wanted to stay out in the bare night and be scoured clean by the cold black air, the violent noise of the traffic. I wanted to be stripped of longing, the airless thirst of the body, the reaching of the feelings for something to rebound against. I went back to my apartment and made myself a drink I couldn’t taste, holding my heart as if to stem a leak.
At nearly four o’clock that morning, hoping for a message from Maria, I turned my phone back on. I had missed fourteen calls from Theo—which wasn’t unusual—and there was a voice mail waiting. I was relieved to listen to it instead of having to speak to her.
There was a long pause before she began to speak, during which I almost hung up. Her voice was frayed, slippery, as if she had been crying.
“Jonathan . . . I have to say this on the phone even though phones aren’t safe, because I don’t know how else to speak to you. But I have to tell you. I hid outside Eve’s study when the solicitor came because I wanted to find out what she’d done to you. I heard them through the window. Eve said his name, she said ‘Michael Caplin.’ She said ‘I don’t see that as a problem.’ I remember every single word they said. The solicitor said ‘he hasn’t touched the money for a year now.’ Then she said ‘Well, we’ve had no sign of him here. If he doesn’t access the fund it’s up to him.’ Then I asked Eve later, ‘Where is our father?’ and she was angry and said he was dead, and then I knew it was her, she must have killed him, because of the money, the money conspiracy with Tang Beijing and the gallery and the data entry, and I knew she’d done something to you too. I don’t know if she’s in the pictures now listening to me, in the television. You’re gone—” She broke off, in tears.
“They told me you were coming back but I know they’re lying. They’ve killed you. That’s how they’re going to keep me away from you. I don’t have much time. I can’t stay here; I’m going to escape. I worked it out finally, how to be with you and him again. I’ll be a ghost too. They won’t be able to find us, the three of us, and we’ll be far away, Jonathan. . . . We’ll be so happy.”
She started to say something else but the end of the message cut her off, and when I tried to call her back, there was no answer.
I was shivering badly when I called Evendon. I sat on the edge of the bed in my apartment and watched my hands trembling on the phone as if they were made of paper.
After a long time the new housekeeper answered, voice muddy with sleep, then after another long time I heard Eve’s voice, tiny, then real as she neared the telephone. “It’s who?” she was saying. Then she picked up the receiver: “Jonathan, is everything okay?”
Her voice had the normal, substantial tone of someone sitting on a cream damask sofa, wearing a silk dressing gown, looking out over an organized arrangement of lilies; the clipped sweep of the dark lawns in the light of the house. I could picture the way she always sat, like marble with a moving mouth, one leg folded over the other, toe pointing.
“I don’t know,” I said. “Has Theo been with you today?”
“She hasn’t come back tonight so far as I know. She went out with a friend, I think.”
“Did she tell you when she’d be back?”
“She never does, darling. Is something wrong? Shall I tell her to call you back? Having said that, she has a thing about the telephone at the moment. She says she doesn’t believe in it. It must be some new-age nonsense she’s picked up.”
“I’m worried about her,” I said. “About her state of mind. Can you tell her to call me when she comes home?”
“Of course. I suppose she has been moody recently. Sullen, almost. But I don’t see that that’s anything to worry about. You know Theo.”
“It seems I don’t know much about anything,” I said. I hardly knew what I was saying. I had a growing dread of the conversation, but like a rolling car on a hill I could only watch it move, gathering speed.
“Jonathan?” Eve asked. “Are you quite alright?”
“Did Theo ask you about our father?”
I could hear Eve’s irritation now, twitching under the smooth flat surface of her voice. “She may have mentioned him. I can’t quite remember.”
“Surely it wasn’t that long ago. You can’t remember what she asked you?”
I was broken up in many pieces, my tissue like streamers attached to the bones, flapping loose. Eve’s voice whistled through the wreck, metallic and narrow. “Jonathan, I don’t understand why you’re questioning me like this, at this time in the morning. This isn’t like you at all. Are you drunk?”
“He’s still alive,” I interrupted her. “Isn’t he?”
There was a silence.
“What did you do to him?”
“This is not rational,” Eve said, her voice colder and sharper than I’d ever heard it before, the clothes that her voice normally wore—the velvet and silk—all stripped away. “I think you’d better call me back when you’re in a more reasonable mood.” So I hung up on her.
I tried Theo’s mobile several times but it just rang on, drilling its noise into empty space. The light from the window was a diluted black, like oil on water. I couldn’t straighten my body or stand up; the center of my body was all a cold hurt, a solid sharpness. I stayed crouched over myself, holding the telephone, which my fingers could not warm. I knew already that she was not going to answer it, but I came up with a scene in Wales, a lock-in at a pub, Theo’s phone ringing in her bag next to her, the noise blotted up by their laughter. Theo would be smoking, wearing a torn pair of tights, one of my shirts, a silk scarf picked up on her way out, which would irritate Alicia. She had forgotten about leaving the voice mail because whatever she had taken earlier had dissolved now into harmless particles, easing its hold on her. Her friends were teasing her about it now that it was over. “You were really freaking out,” one of them was saying. “You said all kinds of crazy stuff.” Theo, embarrassed, winding her finger through her hair, laughing.
After a while I was able to uncurl my spine, make my hands rigid enough to start my car. I drove toward Wales, nearly alone on the motorway as the night changed from charcoal to gray and the rain began, and even though I believed in the pub—gripping the idea of it so hard that its warmth and light began to waver, shiver like a flame—I could hear something else running above the pub’s sounds, a list being counted down whether I listened to it or tried not to hear it, of all the things I should have said to Theo.
Then the telephone started ringing on the car seat next to me, and I saw her with her hair lifting like smoke all around her face, staring up at the clouds, which rolled on, marching across the sky.
2008
At the airport I watch my luggage slide away through long plastic teeth as the man at the desk looks at me suspiciously. With his slot-shaped mouth and unlit eyes, he resembles a switched-off DVD player. I consider smiling, to convince him that—despite my unshaven face and my slightly desperate appearance—I’m not a terrorist, but the disused corners of my mouth just won’t do it.
As I wait on a nailed-down chair for the screens to tell me I can leave, I feel the light weight of eyes on me and look up to see a small child sitting in a wheelchair opposite, watching me as he rotates a lollipop in his bright green mouth. Children can enjoy the luxury of gazing: as we get older there are consequences for a stare, so we learn not to do it (or most of us do—Theo never did). I spend at least ten minutes under the child’s unmoving, benign scrutiny, until he is wheeled away by his parents. Then I feel suddenly alone, and get up to wander the airport, looking for food I don’t particularly want to eat.
I
n the end I join the nearest queue, which is at a fast food chain. There are posters of American buildings on the walls with neon lights and Cadillacs outside. There are also mirrors, which reflect everything with a slightly yellowish tinge. I wonder if this is deliberate, a deflation of the ego: instilling a sense of self-hatred to encourage comfort eating.
“Would you like the meal deal?” the girl behind the counter asks, looking not quite at me.
“Yes, please.” She is pretty; her hair is tied back and her pale ears and neck exposed, the skin too young, too subtle for the cheap, bright uniform and stiff cap. But her face has a hard certainty; a lack of interest, sealing her over against her surroundings.
“What drink?” She doesn’t look up from the little keypad.
“Excuse me? Oh, no drink, thank you.”
“The drink is part of the meal deal.” She looks up at me now, fingers hovering.
“Water, then.” As she keys it in I ask, “What’s it like working here?”
She pauses, not quite thrown off. People probably ask her this often, kindly mother-aged women, lonely or lecherous old men. “It’s a job, isn’t it,” she says. “Four pounds ninety-nine then, please.”
I hand her a note and get in return a dutiful smile, a flat-looking burger, and some spindly chips.
“Are you happy?” I ask suddenly.
“What?”
“I said, thank you.”
When the flight is boarding I hand my pass over to three women, all in frosted blue eye shadow, guarding their gateway casually, barely glancing at the paper. “Have a nice flight,” one says, winking at me, so that the others giggle.
On the plane I sit next to a woman in a dark dull coat and glasses, who stares at the tiny film above our heads, uninterested in neighborliness. Outside the plane window, the sky looks like the Arctic; a blue sky over a tundra of clouds, pools of blue water. I read the in-flight shopping magazine to pass the time. Then I read the safety leaflet. I run through my escape route in my head before I realize that in a crash I wouldn’t want to escape. I would shut my eyes and wait to see her, ready to tell her all the things I need to say, that I have been holding until this moment. Over time the details of what I have planned to say have fallen away; my offering condensed to its pure forms, its most simple elements. I am sorry. I love you. Please forgive me.
The Other Half of Me Page 23
