2000 - The Feng-Shui Junkie

by Brian Gallagher

  “What’s in the package, Ronan?”

  “A fish tank, what else.”

  Mother is peering through a crack in the kitchen door. Grinning at me. She’s in an excellent mood. Clearly delighted she’s got her grand piano. But also excited at the prospects offered up by the next few minutes of life on earth.

  The cloakroom door closes again and Ronan sits down on the banana couch and removes two shiny new brown shoes. Then he gets up and picks his package off the couch and approaches the lounge. I lower my eyes to my magazine. His footsteps cease. I assume he’s reached the doorway.

  Perhaps his eyes are delaying on the short black dress and black shoes I purchased this morning? Or on my nicely arranged hair? Or on my stunningly landscaped face?

  Or perhaps he’s noticed something else.

  “Julie. What is that?”

  First I look up, then following his gaze I very very slowly glance over my shoulder towards the baby grand. “Oh, that? Well…it’s got five letters.”

  There’s this barely audible click. We both glance towards the kitchen door. Mother dear has just closed it. She’s very discreet that way. Very unobtrusive.

  Ronan speaks again from his stationary doorway position, inhaling deeply under the weight of the fish tank. “What’s it doing here, Julie?”

  “I won it in a raffle.”

  Bad news has to be broken gradually.

  He rushes in now with his heavy glass load, places it clumsily on the pedestal and flips off the packing. There’s silence behind me. I wonder if he’ll recognize the piano?

  “It’s nice, isn’t it?”

  Now there’s this squeaking sound: it creaks like lightning through the night sky of my memories. It’s the sound of the piano lid being raised. Mother is privileged to possess a piano which, when you raise the lid, sounds like a coffin-opening party in The Evil Dead. I remember it so well.

  “You won it in a raffle?”

  “Yes indeed.”

  “I’d recognize this piece of junk anywhere, Julie. It belongs to your mother.”

  Guess who walks through the kitchen door just then.

  Mum is great. She really is. She has Ronan by the balls. She’s performing this charm assault on him that would make Michelle Pfeiffer look like Splodge.

  The stages of her crafty, highly skilled technique are as follows:

  1 Warm smile: “Hello, Ronan! ”

  2 Diversionary tactics: “That’s a lovely new fish tank you got.” She goes over to admire.

  3 Blaming me: “You should have let Julie buy it; after all, she was the one who broke it ”

  4 Humble apology: “Oh, by the way, Ronan, I’m sorry about the piano. I know it’s taking up a terrible amount of space… ”

  5 Feigned recognition of authority: “…but if it’s all right with you… ”

  6 Lies and conspiracy: “…I’ll keep it here for just a few days until we sell it off again.”

  Old women, as we know, get away with murder.

  Ronan is barely reassured. He just stands there, hands on his hips, exhaling deeply. He makes some face-saving, humorous comment about how the lounge in its present colour scheme reminds him of Carolan’s Irish Cream.

  Then he goes out and takes a shower, and prepares himself for dinner at La Boheme’s, which he booked for the two of us to shut me up.

  “He’s right about one thing, though,” Mother says when we have the room once more to ourselves.

  “What?”

  “That smell.”

  “Yes,” I reply, lowering my eyes to my magazine. “I had no idea salmon would smell like that.”

  “You were cooking salmon?”

  “Yes, a kind of mousseline.” She grins, but in a way that makes me highly apprehensive.

  My mother brought me up to be a good Christian and a good animal lover. Good Christians and good animal lovers don’t do what I did to those tropical marine fish. Dead or alive.

  “Oh, and by the way, Julie.”

  “Mm?”

  “Where are all the missing fish?”

  When I look up I can see her smiling, bespectacled eyes boring into me over the top of her magazine. They are dazzling me with suspicion.

  I stand up at once and leave the room.

  29

  And here we are at La Boheme’s.

  Ronan is formal and quiet and distant. For his starter, he’s eating breaded mushrooms with yoghurt sauce, a fairly vile combination in my book. I’m just sitting here slivering lemony smoked salmon into my principal orifice, feeling a bit wicked over the fish.

  We eat in silence.

  Whenever we dine out he rarely speaks during the first third of his meal. His excuse is that eating is a form of work and he can’t do two things at once. The truth, however, is that conversing with wives is a form of work. Mistresses, now, that’s a different matter entirely.

  In time our escalopes de veau (Ronan) and roast duck with orange sauce (moi ) arrive. It’s not before his eighth bite into his escalopes that Ronan is ready for his speciality: communication.

  “So…” he begins.

  “Comma.”

  “How is your duck?”

  “Hysterical.”

  He chuckles to himself.

  “Ronan.”

  “Mm?”

  “When are you taking your summer leave?”

  He clears his throat after a delayed spell of munching, wine-sipping and glass replacement.

  “Some time between mid-August and mid-September.”

  “Possibly early September?”

  “Yes, why?”

  “No reason. I just thought it’d be nice to go back to Corfu.”

  “Corfu?” he says. “Why not? It’s lovely in August.”

  “Do you remember our holiday there?”

  We reminisce a little about the heat, the long, winding paths down to the beach on which locals on mules sold us cheap wine, the sunsets over the sea, Sotiris’s restaurant in the evenings, the music and dancing, one dance where a waiter rotated on his haunches, swinging a table from his teeth.

  “Behaviour like that can dislodge one’s fillings,” he observes.

  We talk about the women dressed in black from head to toe, the tiny whitewashed terraced houses and alleyways, the strange language, the way we used to pick figs from the fig trees behind the beach…

  “It was so…authentic,” I sigh.

  “If you exclude the Sunday Times.”

  I laugh despite myself.

  He breaks off and butters a small piece of breadroll and pops it into his mouth. “I’d go back for the feta cheese alone.”

  “The baclavas.”

  “The swordfish, the vino mavro… ”

  “That was a bit sharp, Ronan.”

  “What? The wine?” He grins. “Remember the orange brandy?”

  “The ouzo – after that I remembered nothing.”

  “The baked Gruyere: not bad considering it wasn’t French.”

  “The lobster. Ugh!”

  “The brain: a rare delicacy,” he says.

  “Only in your head is brain a delicacy, Ronan.”

  “Very good, Julie.”

  “The mosquitoes…”

  He frowns. “What sauce did they come with?”

  “Seriously, though, they drove me insane.”

  “The thing about mosquitoes,” he begins, slicing his veal, “is that those insects are highly gifted. Telepathic. You know, people think that they attack only when you switch the light off. They don’t: they wait until you’ve stopped thinking about them. Then they pounce. They’re even more cunning than spiders.”

  “They were huge. Like bluebottles suspended in mid-air.”

  “Not unlike yourself, Julie, they are partial to big epidermal booze-ups.”

  “Anyway,” I remind him, ignoring this, “we got our revenge.”

  “Yes, although our host wasn’t too happy with the red dots all over the wallpaper.”

  “I wasn’t too happy with them
all over my body.”

  “And he wasn’t too pleased with our squeaking bed either.”

  “How were we to know he was sleeping in the room beneath?”

  “You could hear him snoring.”

  “That’s true. But we never got up to anything until he started snoring.”

  “You forget, Julie, that he had a wife.”

  “Don’t remind me. The one with the whiskers.”

  “Do you remember the bed?”

  “Hard and bristly,” I reply.

  “It nearly gave me a slipped disc.”

  I pause at this point.

  “We know why.”

  Ronan laughs. “I seem to remember once getting a leg stuck in the cast-iron bed-end.”

  Kinky sex again. You just can’t get him off it.

  “We’re talking Greek Orthodox, Ronan. Those beds were designed like that for a reason.”

  For the first time in months I have just made Ronan choke on his food.

  An excellent sign for the future.

  “Ronan, I want us to go back there.”

  “Sounds good to me.”

  “I was thinking…the first week in September.”

  “What’s wrong with August?” He doesn’t catch my gaze. He lifts up his wineglass instead.

  “A friend of Sylvana’s has an apartment in Pelekas but it’s booked up in August. And I have to be back at work for the second week of September.”

  “Leave it with me.”

  “No. We have to grab it while it’s there. I want to go in early September, Ronan.”

  He frowns at my insistence. “I may have something on that week.”

  “Such as?”

  “But I’ll get back to you on it, as soon as I can.”

  Restrained, I sip my Châteauneuf. “By the way, I’ve booked the theatre.”

  “What’s on?”

  “Salome. You adore Oscar Wilde.”

  “Great. When for?”

  “Next Tuesday evening.”

  While I am forking duck into my gob I notice from the corner of my eye that Ronan’s wineglass has halted in mid-air.

  “But what’s wrong with next Saturday?”

  We normally go on Saturdays.

  “There’s a girls’ night out next Saturday.”

  “What’s wrong with the following Saturday?” he complains.

  “The production ends this weekend.”

  I know because I checked.

  He does not look pleased.

  “Ronan, the point is: what is wrong with next Tuesday?”

  “Actually, there’s a problem.”

  “What?”

  “There’s a conference in Paris next Tuesday.”

  “Is that what you call it.”

  “It’s a dentistry conference. I forgot to tell you about it.”

  “Aha.”

  “It’s on an important topic: pyorrhoea alveolaris.”

  Whenever you feel horny and crave a dirty weekend, invent a conference abroad. Trouble is, he’s been to dentistry conferences, aesthetics conventions, philosophy colloquia, art appreciation courses all over Europe. Where does that leave me?

  “Why don’t we both go?”

  He shakes his head.

  “Why not? While you’re at the conference I’ll go shopping.”

  “It’s awkward: I’m staying with French friends in La Defense.”

  “I’m sure there’d be room for me in the bed.”

  “They only have a couch.”

  “I don’t mind.”

  “If I remember correctly, it’s a bit small. Even for one.”

  “So we’ll stay at the Hotel Pierre, then. We’re not poor.”

  “I must go easy,” he says, replacing his glass. “The Porsche repairs have made one or two inroads into my vast fortune.”

  “I hope you’re not overspending. You know how expensive it can be, buying for two.”

  I can almost hear a ton of scaffolding suddenly collapse inside his brain. I sip my wine in perfect innocence. His cheekbones are beginning to glow. I throw him a wicked grin. “I mean – for you and me.”

  He laughs, refilling my glass. “I thought you were on to me.”

  I want to scream at him once and for all. I want to purge it from my system because it’s driving me crazy and I don’t know how much longer I can keep up the charade.

  But I must remain calm.

  He, after all, is calm.

  I rest my chin on my joined fingers and gaze nostalgically out of the window into the blushing evening. This section of the restaurant overlooks the canal, on the far side of which is a row of trees overhanging the bank. The treetops spike the clear but darkening golden sky like a thousand scissor tips.

  I gulp down some sparkling water. I lean forward. “What’s your opinion of adultery, Ronan?”

  Pause.

  “What’s brought this on?”

  “I just wanted your opinion. It’s for a feasibility study I’m doing.”

  He grins. “Adultery is underrated.”

  “I see.”

  “Seriously though, there’s one thing all women should understand about men.” He pats his mouth with his napkin. “To most married men, a mistress is no more than a remote-control pleasure device.”

  I glance at the table next to us. “You mean, the wife has a remote prospect of controlling her husband’s pleasure?”

  “No, Julie. I’m referring to the convoluted world of male sexuality.”

  He takes a French roll from the basket, breaks it in half and starts to chew, although he’s already finished his meal. “A mistress is simply an extension of male fantasy,” he explains.

  “I admit it hadn’t occurred to me.”

  “Male fantasy life is intrinsically adulterous. It’s back to genetics – man the hunter, the warrior, the adventurer, the guardian, the protector of women.”

  “What a quaint way to view life.”

  “What I’m trying to say is that adultery is a mental state.”

  “Although a bed comes in quite useful too.”

  He chews on his roll. “Beds are overrated.”

  “You prefer desks, then.”

  “Desks, tables, chairs…With the mind…” he points to his head, where he imagines his mind to be located “…with the mind, any position is feasible. It’s all about imagination. The poetics of the possible. The point is, every man is guilty even before he has a so-called affair.”

  “So-called.”

  “It’s just a word.”

  I want so badly, so desperately for Ronan to stop putting on this act. I want him so badly just to be himself, to hide nothing, to come clean. If only he did that I would be the best wife he could ever have. I would never nag him again. I would never question him again. Even my genetically encoded pestering response would shrivel up and die.

  A waitress approaches with a dessert menu. Ronan shuns it and orders two coffees instead. She disappears.

  I suddenly grab his hand on the table and hold it down.

  “Ronan, I know there’s something on your mind. I know there is. I know it’s bothering you. Look at me, I’m talking to you. You know I love you, I knew from the first second I laid my eyes on you that we’d be together. We’re so good together, everything is going so well: our careers, our home, we have fun…we’ve got so much ahead of us. I just, I just…”

  He eyes me as if I am unclean. “I haven’t an idea what you’re talking about.”

  I am imploring him. Beseeching him. Appealing to every nerve fibre in his being that flickers in response to vulnerability, pity and humiliation. But he’s frozen up like an igloo.

  “Please, Ronan, tell me what’s on your mind.”

  “There’s nothing on my mind, for God’s sake.”

  “Don’t do this to me,” I plead.

  “Well, I mean, if I had a notion what all this was about.”

  He’s testing me.

  But I can’t tell him. I can’t. I cannot beg him to be honest. I canno
t beg him to be loyal. I will not beg him to be faithful, to be true. I will not beg him to love me. If he doesn’t want to love me the way I deserve to be loved, I will not force him. It must come from him.

  “Ronan, whatever you’ve done it means nothing any more. There’s just the two of us now.”

  “You think I’m having an affair, don’t you?”

  “Ronan, please don’t lie to me. That’s all I ask you. Don’t lie to me. Because if you do, everything will change. And there will be no going back. I mean it.”

  “You think I’m having an affair.” He laughs, like I’m a fool.

  “I don’t know.”

  “Yes, you do. You actually think I’m seeing someone.” He’s incredulous, contemptuous.

  I can’t believe he’s doing this to me. I just can’t believe it. “I didn’t say that.”

  “You implied it.”

  “Well, is it true?”

  “There you go again.”

  “Well, is it?”

  He shrugs and says in a bored voice: “It’s just your female insecurity.”

  It’s unbearable.

  “Please!”

  “Julie…”

  “Please, Ronan…”

  “You’re pestering me.”

  Dead silence.

  He rearranges his napkin on his lap. The girl brings our coffees. Before she’s even put mine down in front of me, I stand up and walk out through the restaurant.

  He doesn’t try to follow. At the doorway, when I look back, he is calmly sipping his coffee.

  Once outside, I call Sylvana to instruct her to make up a spare bed.

  Sunday, 19 June, afternoon

  30

  The name Mr Ronan Fitzgerald BA BDent SC is written in gold lettering on a plaque (good word, for a dentist), next to an assortment of less elegant-looking plaques for general practitioners and a chiropodist. His surgery is straight through at the bottom rear of the building, an extension built out into the garden to accommodate four rooms: the main surgery, the office, the kitchen and the bathroom, which is equipped with a built-in shower.

  Using a key he gave me a long time ago, I let myself in through the main door and into Ronan’s rooms. The smell hits me as I knew it would. That dentist’s disinfectant odour. That minty Listerine scent you get from guys in the Law Library who figure that if they wash their gullets with the stuff they stand a better chance of a free screw.