2000 - The Feng-Shui Junkie

by Brian Gallagher

  I lock the door behind me.

  Dentists. They’ve brought me such pain in life. They’ve burst my gums, picked my teeth, drilled and ravaged my nerves, pliered out my molars and snurgled my saliva. I’ve never liked them.

  It’s a miracle I married one.

  In here is where we had our third date ever. He clearly wanted to impress me by professionally penetrating the putridest recesses of my teeth. I don’t know why I agreed to the privilege of a free consultation. I must have imagined he’d look sexy in his white coat.

  He showed me into this acid-smelling torture chamber and made it all so very accessible, explaining to me the function of each little device in a relaxed though impersonal manner, me standing here the whole time dying to ride him on the chaise longue. But instead, he sat me on the chaise and flipped on this white face mask like he was afraid of catching something. Then, eyes poking like brown bulbs over his mask, he stuck into my mouth these cold metal implements which made these percussive sounds against my teeth. With his spatula he prodded me, frowning and silent, in the most barren, unromantic places imaginable.

  Basically, I was forgotten.

  Making me hold the saliva Hoover in my mouth, he syringed my interior cheek and filled my fourth left molar. He was silent until the end of the procedure when he told me to spit, which cascaded me into a whirlpool of anaesthetized, dribbling giggles. Not once did he smile: he was the total professional.

  I figured he needed to be loosened up a little. So before we left the building for a light lunch, I pinned him to the door, tore off his shirt, undid his belt, trousers – everything. And I practically raped him.

  He’s been filling my cavities ever since.

  I’m in his office now, staring at his pine desk, checking to see if there are any marks from Friday lunchtime. Buckle scratches, or ring scrapes, or bracelet marks, or suchlike. Nothing. It might never have happened. Things look so normal: his blotting pad, his phone and fax machine, his new computer and printer, his filing cabinet.

  I turn to Nicole’s painting on the wall. I’ve just noticed something I didn’t see before. On the bottom right-hand side, marked in tiny letters, is the title of the painting.

  Chi.

  Ignoring this minor disturbance for the moment, I rifle through the three drawers of his desk. In the top drawer are contained recent receipts, acknowledgements, invoices in respect of goods delivered, dispatched, ordered.

  In the second drawer are brochures from the Dental Health Association advertising upcoming conferences, exchanges, lectures. As well as brochures and leaflets containing information on new products, new technologies, new medications, new manuals.

  For such an aesthete, all this garbage must kill him.

  In the third drawer, alongside cards from patients of his, invitations and newspaper clippings concerning a local dentistry malpractice suit, I find a photo of Nicole. She is smiling appealingly straight at the camera, head tilted, wearing a thick white woollen polo-neck with a long yellow scarf draped round her neck and hanging down by her side.

  I want to take the photo and smudge it in dogshit.

  But no. It gets carefully replaced.

  Turning to the filing cabinet, I pull out the second drawer and separate the files at ‘M’. I finger through the ‘M’s meticulously. Immediately I find what I’m looking for. I pull out a letter, signed ‘Lucien Morel’, Ronan’s former aesthetics lecturer at the Sorbonne. Careless boy.

  It is dated 5 June. It is addressed to this surgery. It is in English. Crap English, but English none the less.

  Galerie Richelieu

  47 rue des Ecoles

  75005 Paris

  Dear Ronan, 5 June

  It is with profound delight that I take this opportunity to inform you that Georges (Lafayette) has arranged an exhibition of the work of the delightful Mademoiselle Summers. It will be for the beginning of September next and it will be in respect of her highly original oeuvre entitled Chi. Your photographic representations of her three oeuvres entitled Foetus, Umbilical Rope and Discarded Clothes elicited some interest, but it is Chi which has caused a burst of lightning to emit from the sky.

  Georges is keen to arrange a further meeting with the artist some time in the coming weeks, in order to view these three aforementioned works with a view to possible inclusion in the September exhibition. There will be naturally exhibition charges and my own lesser commission, but I feel that there may be in this country considerable interest in Mademoiselle Summers’s work and that the Lafayette Galleries are the perfect platform on which to launch her career in the direction of every success.

  If you on behalf of Mademoiselle Summers are agreeable to considering the possibility of sale of Chi, then this is something which I believe might be a fruitful theme for discussion.

  I beg you to contact me at your convenience at the above number in the Sorbonne where I can be mostly found in order that we might arrange a date in June when you might both be able to travel here with the ultimate objective of organizing a programme of exhibitions for your client’s oeuvre. So far, Tuesday, 21 June would be a convenient date for me, so if this is appropriate for you also, please let me know as soon as possible.

  Please accept my most affectionate and distinguished respects,

  Lucien Morel

  I replace the letter, close the filing cabinet and sink into the chair beneath his desk.

  Tuesday, 21 June. Mid-summer.

  I just sit here in perfect silence for a long, long time, listening to the rumble of passing cars outside, tyres slashing and splashing, and splicing through the wetness of today’s roads.

  Raising my eyes, I stare for a long time at Nicole’s colourful goldfish painting. Ronan’s passport into the art world. The picture that has the capacity to transform his life. Nicole’s life.

  My life.

  I, on the other hand, have the capacity to transform its life.

  I lift the painting from its nail and carry it into the kitchen, dropping it flat on the table.

  Not having eaten yet today, I open the fridge.

  It’s full of food. Either his secretary or Nicole herself was shopping. There’s everything a starving human could ask for: cheese slices, butter, eggs, apple tart, bread, yoghurt, a pecan pie. I slice open a carton of diet peach yoghurt and pour its cold dairyness down my throat.

  This gives me instant relief.

  With the bread-knife I cut myself a slice of pecan pie.

  Five gobfuls later and it’s gone.

  Jesus, I’m ravenous.

  The bread. The cheese. The butter.

  I’m thinking: I’d kill for cheese on toast.

  I take two slices of bread from the pack, make two slices of toast, cover them in swimming butter, hack off two chunks of orange cheddar and implant them on the toast. Finally, I place them under the grill and switch on the mains, then turn up the knob.

  Under the sink I discover an unopened six-pack of Budweiser. I tear one off and snap the ring and start drinking. I sit down at the table on a cold wooden chair and finish off the can. I contemplate Chi, lying in front of me. I have to admit that it makes me furiously angry and jealous that the people who count regard Nicole’s ‘work’ as ‘highly original’.

  The sharp smell of grilling cheddar is making me salivate.

  I guzzle some more beer.

  Chi.

  I hold up the painting, at the end of outstretched arms to see what all the fuss was about.

  No. I just can’t see it. Either I’m a philistine or I’m blind.

  Or else it’s truly crap.

  Try holding it upside down.

  Ah, that looks better already.

  I drop the painting and grab the grill before my cheese on toast catches fire. The black edges are fuming with thick smoke. But the golden centres are saved. I shake them on to a plate and start munching into the rubbery cheddar, melting into my teeth. I spring open a third can of Budweiser.

  Before the can rehits the table I get thi
s blinding flash of light in my brain. I stand up.

  Using a tape-measure I spotted in the cutlery drawer, I measure the painting along its shortest edge. Fifteen inches across. Fine.

  Now I’m holding the tape-measure across the mouth of the grill.

  Seventeen inches.

  I shove it in and turn up the heat.

  Sitting back down again, hands behind my head, I calmly observe the industrious toasting process of Ronan’s grill going full speed ahead. There is inside my digestive tract a thickening, sickening sensation fraught with excitement and dread.

  I could have done far worse. There’s a lot of expensive equipment in this surgery: the dental chair, made in Hong Kong, the cost of a second-hand MG to replace; the white robot-limb light fixed to the ceiling, the cost of a holiday for two in Barbados; the X-ray apparatus, the cost of a holiday time-share for a decade; the lotions and potions and mirrors and instruments and glass cabinets; the ornate spit fountain.

  With the sledgehammer lying lazily under the sink? Ronan is a lucky man. I am doing him an enormous favour by in effect burning an extra-large slice of toast on the grill.

  I am also saving his marriage.

  A loud siren blasts off in my ear. The smoke alarm. I jump up and rip it off the wall, shove it on the table and banjax it several times with the lump hammer until it behaves itself. Then I beat my way through black smoke and caustic stench, and pull the painting from the grill and dump it on the draining board beside it.

  A terrible beauty is born.

  I carry the blackened remains through the surgery, leaving a trail of black smoke hanging in its wake. In his office I attach it once more to the wall, ensuring it’s hung crooked.

  I stand back to survey my richly allusive reinterpretation of Nicole’s masterpiece.

  I could feel guilty, but I don’t.

  You see, it’s not enough metaphorically to kick my bastard husband in the teeth. I’ve been doing this for at least sixty hours, but like a stubborn mule he has failed to respond to the suggestive power inherent in the act. Hence, he’s deprived me of the immense satisfaction you normally get from kicking bastard husbands in the teeth.

  No: I have been driven to redefining radically that which lies closest to his heart.

  Chi is no more.

  Before I leave, I survey the state of the kitchen. A plate with crumbs and melted butter, three cans of Budweiser and the yoghurt carton. There’s no point in clearing it away. Ronan will never associate the food with me. He will simply assume that Harry built up an appetite watching Chi smoulder.

  Harry the psycho. When Ronan walks in first thing tomorrow morning, the poor boy will be shitting a colosseum.

  Before I leave I grab the hammer and put a hole through the window adjoining the back door, then unlock it.

  I leave the surgery the way I came in, double-locking it behind me.

  I’m on the top of the bus going back to Sylvana’s place, now, and we’re purring along the blustery coastline. The only trace of the recent rainstorm lies on the glistening wet pavements. It is bright once again after the downpour, and I’ve decided to put on my cool tinted and totally seductive Calvin Kleins.

  Every window is down, but still it’s too hot. Warm air mixed with salty sea smells is billowing through the bus messing up my dream hairstyle, but what woman can have it all?

  As I watch the glorious, dangerous blue of the sea stretching clear to the taut wire of the horizon, I am overcome by a pervading sense of peace. I think back on this last hour. It has been eventful.

  And deeply pleasurable.

  Once more I have hope in life.

  In fact, I am quite unable to stop smiling. I’m getting one or two looks from these scruffy louts who are making me feel like an illegal alien from outer space. You feel such a prat on a bus when you’re smiling and the rest of the world is glum.

  Seriously, though, I am filled with such an unutterably profound sense of satisfaction after my evening’s entertainment that I want this feeling to go on for ever.

  Monday, 10 June, afternoon

  31

  I’m roasting in a tiny pool of sunlight, seated outside Renaldo’s café only five minutes’ walk from home.

  Overhead is a wash of bright-leafed lime trees, sweeping gently in the welcome cool breeze and speckling the pavement with dapples of yellow confetti from the dazzling sun above. Through the leaves the sky is a fluttering blue-green. Opposite is the ferry terminal whose shiny white facade is lined by palm trees in huge boxes – imported. The pier stretches out into the sparkling sun and sea, yellow as a banana in the bright glare. At the end of the pier is the lighthouse one mile out. It seems like it’s just resting on the hazy blue water.

  It’s one of those days where you want to say: if only Ronan were here to share it with me.

  Instead, I get to share it with Nicole.

  How did this happen, you ask?

  She rang me this lunchtime. I was in a café at the time, adjacent to the Law Library, overdosing on espresso and caramel slices, experiencing repeated surges of pleasure as I visualized Ronan walk into his surgery this very morning, only to discover his recently combusted Chi hanging from the wall to cool.

  He must be furious, I was thinking.

  These fond thoughts were going through my head when my cellular phone suddenly pealed like a spiked javelin into the middle of the small café, and naturally every luncher in the place turns round and glares at me like we’re living in some sort of mobile-free zone.

  I picked up. It was Nicole.

  I asked her how she was, in an utterly uninterested voice. Unfortunately, she told me. She was all: “Hi, Julianne. I feel so great. What a wonderful world. I’m so happy! I’m overcoming my neuroses and insecurities, and it’s all down to the most amazing man you’d ever meet and oh I’m so lucky, oh, I know you don’t like me going on about it, but I’ve just got to share my happiness with someone – will you meet me today, Julianne? Please!”

  I was sorely tempted to make one from a list of nasty sarcastic comments, including the expression ‘you rat-turd’ or a near equivalent. But was there any point? Things were working out in my favour anyway, so why waste energy getting upset?

  “I’ve nothing to lose,” I replied.

  “Great!”

  We arranged to meet at five at a location of my choice.

  So here I am, sitting at a coffee table just a few hundred yards down the road from where we live. Sipping a nerve-racking roast from Chile, so dark and strong it’s sure to be loaded with cancer, which is precisely why I love it so.

  You know, the South Americans are so good on coffee they must be the most wide-awake folk on earth. I dread to think what the males are like, though: Latin men are hyper enough as it is without mind-blowing caffeine to turn them hog-wild.

  I order a slice of ricotta cake. Sheer confectionate orgasm. And thus do I squat, rocking gently to and fro on the two teetering hind hooves of my white plastic chair, listening to the ebb and flow of the sea wash one minute away, gently fingering the fading seconds of my eternal summer, before Nicole arrives and tells me something happy to put me in a bad mood.

  She arrives half an hour late, just when I was on the point of ordering a second slice of ricotta. She’s carrying this large box thing. Reminds me a bit of Ronan with the new fish tank. She’s wearing this foolish pineapple smile that I want to tear off her face like a bumper sticker.

  She gives me an unexpected little hug and tumbles her ramshackle apologies and excuses down on top of me for being late. She puts down her large rectangular object. It’s got these plastic bars. I now see what it contains: it’s a small, furry, black animal with tiny, piercing, evil eyes.

  “Nicole,” says I, pointing. “What is that…thing doing here?”

  She sits down. “Julianne…I’ve got a little…favour to ask you.”

  “No way.”

  “But I haven’t even asked you yet.”

  “Nicole, you bring your cat here, in a
box, and you tell me you have a favour to ask of me and you think I can’t guess what it is?”

  “Okay,” she says, disappointed. “I won’t ask.”

  Plastering over her hurt, she bravely orders two cappuccinos from a nearby waitress. It doesn’t occur to her that I might prefer, say, a moccha. Sour grapes.

  She bends down and starts fiddling with the clasps of the box. “Poor Max,” she gushes, lifting him out of his cell like a soggy black sweater. “Come and join us.”

  Actually, I’d rather Max did not come and join us for a cappuccino. Cats and cappuccinos don’t mix (not even extra-milky cappuccino). Besides, this particular cat makes me nervous. The runt knows things about me.

  “Isn’t he beautiful?” says Nicole, gently but firmly nestling the miniature panther on her lap like a baby.

  “No, he’s ugly and vicious, and I don’t want him near me.”

  She looks at me, confused for a second, then she laughs it off. She thinks I’m just being ‘Julianne’.

  “You’re not ugly, Max, are you, pet?”

  “Oh yes he is. And vicious and smelly and horrid.”

  “That’s not true. You’re a wonderful cat, aren’t you?”

  Max purrs; he has no problem whatever with this hard sell.

  “You’re a darling,” she googles, kissing the mutt.

  “Don’t forget relativity, Nicole. If he were bigger than you you wouldn’t be cradling him like a baby. You’d be nursing a huge bite in your jugular.”

  “Miaow,” agrees Max.

  “See? He’s a natural-born killer. You should rename him Saddam.”

  “Poor thing,” she sympathizes.

  “Anyway, Nicole, what on earth are you doing wandering down the street with a cat box?”

  She just keeps stroking her fur pot with the evil eye. “I’ve done as you suggested,” she says quietly.

  “What?”

  “I’ve left Harry.”

  I lower my chair on to the floor. “But I didn’t tell you to leave Harry.”

  “You told me I should be more independent-minded and autonomous. I’ve thought a lot about that.”