2000 - The Feng-Shui Junkie

by Brian Gallagher

  “Yes. Chi.”

  “Please don’t call it a painting, Ronan. It was a muck transplant. Nicole, I have something to tell you about your ‘art’. Please read my lips: you are one crap painter. I saw the stuff in your attic. It was laughable. And as for the Chi replica you did on my balcony, that was ludicrous. I’m sure Ronan agrees, though he’s probably too polite to tell you straight.”

  Ronan: “Somehow, the Parisian art world manages to think differently. Let’s go, Nicole. I have no intention of going back home with her.”

  “You think I came here just to haul you back home?”

  Pause.

  I want to grab the nearest wine bottle by the neck and smash it against his skull to see which breaks first.

  “Then why did you come?” he wonders, at the edge of his seat.

  Sylvana: “She wanted to alert poor Nicole here that you’re as big a scumbag asshole as I always suspected.”

  “Who asked you?” says Ronan calmly.

  “One doesn’t require an asshole’s permission to state obvious facts.”

  But there’s barely a flicker from him.

  “Then why did you come here, Julie?” he inquires.

  “You think I came here to bring you back.”

  He shrugs arrogantly. “Then why?”

  I look at Sylvana and she looks at me.

  “Ronan, you are mean and vindictive and deceptive, and even now you seem to enjoy hurting me. I only hope Nicole doesn’t have to go through what you’ve put me through, because in a funny way I think she’s not a bad person. Even though she has done me a terrible wrong.”

  She is staring mournfully at me now, upset, eyes coated in a film of water. Every few seconds her body shudders minutely.

  Ronan: “All the way here – just to tell us that Nicole is not a bad person?”

  Something inside me snaps.

  Coolly, I tell him that our marriage is over.

  “That’s fine,” he says, draining his glass.

  I stand up now. Sylvana follows suit.

  Something occurs to me just before I turn to leave. “Oh – and Ronan, congratulations.”

  “For what?”

  “I believe you’ve achieved one of your central ambitions in life.”

  “What?”

  “To be a father.”

  I sense that somehow I’ve said the wrong thing. Ronan’s reaction is stony. He turns to Nicole, but she just lowers her eyes.

  I turn on my heel and Sylvana follows me past several table-loads of people who have been tuning in to the drama.

  We exit the café and walk down the crowded, lit pavement towards the corner. Passing the Deux Magots café on our left, I suddenly stop. It’s bright inside. I need something strong. Dumping your husband out of your life is not an everyday occurrence and it should be appropriately celebrated. Cognac, since we’re in France.

  Besides, to abstain for another minute would be sheer hell.

  We go inside and sit down at a table close to the window, and Sylvana orders two cognacs. We sit wordless, staring through the glass at the clientele outside who are seated at round tables under the red awning, chatting.

  After a few minutes we spot Nicole passing by in her grass-green chemise. The two of them are walking quickly past the café, Ronan slightly in front, his head down. They don’t see us. They’re having an argument but Ronan doesn’t want to know. You can just make out the streaked mascara on her cheeks. I feel a sudden surge of pity for her as she pleads animatedly with him.

  They proceed to the pedestrian lights at the corner and stop. She grabs him but he pulls away scratching his neck, sliding his hand through his hair.

  Now they disappear round the corner.

  I stare through the window for a long time.

  When I look down, there’s a glass of cognac sitting on the table in front of me.

  Saturday, 25 June, afternoon

  58

  When we arrive back in Dublin airport, guess who’s waiting for us at the arrival gates, smiling from ear to ear?

  She’s already heard of my marital tragedy: I told her by phone from Paris this morning. I told her that what I suspected would happen is now a reality: my life henceforth will be a Ronan-free zone. She was delighted by the news.

  She asked me what time my flight was due back in Dublin. I told her it wasn’t necessary for her to meet me at the airport. She said it would be nice for me to be met, so I told her that I was going straight back to my new apartment, where I needed to be alone for some time, and that therefore meeting me at the airport would be illogical. She started arguing, saying she loved airports. I told her I’d take her to the airport next weekend, and we could sit in the bar together and lick ice creams together and watch planes landing and taking off, and she said no, she loved airports today. I replied that I wanted to be alone and she inquired what was I doing with Sylvana.

  I commanded her not to be at the airport to meet me.

  And what does she do? She comes to the airport sporting a smile the width of a runway.

  The reason she’s happy, I suspect, is because now that Ronan is gone, she imagines that she will be able to retire permanently to my apartment.

  After hugging me and informing me that I am coming home with her because she is tired of cooking for herself, she hugs Sylvana who is a good bit taller than her, practically having to climb on top of her to get a proper grip.

  “It’s nice to see you again, Gertrude,” Sylvana cackles over her shoulder, rubbing her on the back.

  They are both thrilled I have permanently spewed Ronan out of my life. I, however, do not share their delight. All I want to do is go back to my new place and weep.

  I suggest as much to Mother.

  Not a bit of it! She’s not leaving the airport without a snack in the cafeteria, she announces. Plus, she hints, the best close-up relationship post-mortem she’s likely to get this side of hell.

  Up the escalators we go.

  While the two of them queue, I sit down and keep a table.

  Ten minutes later Sylvana strides back complaining about the inefficiency of the management system of this café. She is bearing aloft a tray laden with coffees and cakes and Coke for three. Mother in her smallness is leading the way, still smiling, handbag swinging.

  One huge slice of redcurrant-custard tart is shoved in front of me and I apply the usual protests. Mother advises me not to be silly, that I am very thin and I need to eat up. And that it’s not healthy to starve oneself like my forefathers.

  As if chastened by this thought, she digs immediately into her Black Forest gateau. Sylvana dives into her own chocolate fudge cake. For several minutes they chomp in silence, watching and listening to the moving plethora of life all around us, the voices, the announcements.

  Not one inquiry about how I’m coping in my newly separated state. No: “Will you be okay on your own from now on?” No: “How will you cope, Julie?” No: “Is there anything you need?” Not even: “Is there anybody you’re particularly interested in having murdered?”

  Nothing. Just munching and gentle slurps.

  Mother, in brief, appears indifferent to my suffering. Which is strange, considering she was all over me before I left for Paris. She’s like that. When I appear to be coping she ignores me. But when she sees me crapped with woe she turns into this bathtub of Southern Comfort.

  “Well, Julie,” she says, but not before she’s finished her final forkful. “You’ve hardly told me anything about this Nicole person.”

  So I give it to her on a plate. The whole turkey, skin and bones and teeth and ears and…earrings. I fill in all the missing gaps in her mind: Nicole’s background, Harry, her painting, her Feng Shui, how Ronan met her, his plans to represent her in Paris as an original new artist, what I really did to his car and to her place, what I didn’t do to his surgery although I was tempted.

  Mother is fascinated. She’s most impressed by my arch deceptiveness. She is totally into the way I handled things, drawing th
ings out to the very last before I finally confronted the situation. (Sylvana decides to nod her head at this point and agree, then she sips her Coke.) She also says I’ve been very thoughtful for not wanting to worry her. She says she understands why I didn’t tell her sooner about what was happening, especially about my new apartment – and she doesn’t hold it against me.

  She thinks Nicole is ‘a bit dumb’ for not copping on to the fact that I was Ronan’s wife. But she says if she’s dumb, then Ronan is a real ‘thick’ for not copping on to the fact that the Julianne woman, about whom Nicole spoke so well, actually put a ring round his finger two years previously.

  I, of course, find all this unsolicited support most comforting.

  “One question, Mother. How did you find out Ronan was having an affair?”

  “I found a half-burnt photograph – from your wedding collection. On the balcony.”

  “Oh, no.”

  “When I couldn’t find the wedding photos anywhere I knew something was up. So I rang Sylvana last weekend and she confirmed it for me.”

  “I had to tell her, Julie,” Sylvana says. For the first time in years, vulnerably.

  “Is that why you fed Ronan the fishpaste, Mother? Because you knew what he was up to?”

  Mother, grinning: “Yes. But also because young men like him need to eat good, wholesome food.”

  “But what I find incredible, Mother, was that you told him.”

  “It was the best part, I admit.”

  Amid the general merriment, Mother lays into my redcurrant-custard tart. I point out that it’s mine. She points out that I said I didn’t want any. And she just keeps on eating.

  “Have a bite, Sylvana,” she says. “I don’t want to be greedy.”

  Sylvana calmly steals a forkful.

  You know, it would be almost amusing if it weren’t such a delicious-looking tart. My appetite is beginning to return and Mother dear is monopolizing my dessert, stuffing herself with it like this smiling greed machine. She feels she’s lived and suffered long enough in this world, and the time for depriving herself of its luxuries is now over. So she has to deprive me of them instead. But she eats in such a civilized way you’d never guess we’re touching base animal instinct here: slowly she separates a modest piece from my plate, slowly she raises the fork, slowly she places the fork in her mouth, slowly she chews. So slowly, you’d swear she was born into nobility.

  Still, mothers are wise beings who have suffered so much torment in this life that mere minutes in their company can make you jolly again. Let her, I tell myself.

  The three of us spend the next hour lambasting men.

  Definitely one of life’s coolest pastimes.

  In the end, Mother manages to coax me back home with her. When we get inside and she puts me sitting at the kitchen table, I burst into floods of tears because I can still smell Ronan everywhere around me. She pours me a cup of tea and while I am drinking it she makes this huge racket washing some plates in the sink, just as if she’s drilling a hole through a granite quarry. When she’s finished she dries her hands and pours herself a cup of tea, brings it over and sits down beside me.

  A fixed, determined look has appeared on her face. “Julie, I want you to make a decison here and now.”

  “What kind of decision?” says I, beginning to panic.

  She sighs.

  Feel free, she advises me, to weep my heart and lungs out. Feel free, she prods, to bang my head for three hours against the wailing wall and curse my very existence and have an extended stamping tantrum. Feel free, she lectures, to weep despairingly into my pillow and mourn the loss of the person I used to call my husband, and feel free generally to steep myself in my own soggy, mournful bath of misery and hopelessness and self-beatery, and feel free to desire death from a broken heart…

  Provided, she warns, I confine the woe-is-me session to the next thirty-six hours.

  “Why?” I ask fearfully.

  I mean, considering that one gets such a kick out of being miserable, why on earth would one want to confine it to a limited edition of thirty-six hours?

  “Because on Monday morning you’re going back to work.”

  “Hold on a second, Mother.”

  Monday morning at seven thirty sharp, she announces, will be the beginning of the rest of my life. She will haul me out of my bed by the toenails if she has to, she says.

  So between now and then, I have thirty-six hours to rant. Ronan is worth that, she says, but certainly no more. She refuses to allow me to eat my heart out when it’s his heart that deserves to be eaten out. She says that she herself wasted too many years deciding that Father wasn’t worth wasting so many years on, and she really doesn’t see why I can’t learn the lesson in one and a half days.

  I know she’s right. Working is good because it gets your mind off things. It keeps you strong. It reminds you that even if your life is breaking down and your marriage up – nevertheless you’re not a total dump site.

  And I’ll admit that I enjoy certain aspects of the law, especially personal injuries. It’s mostly males who suffer. Seeing men in pain is a welcome distraction from the tragedy of life.

  Maybe I haven’t woken up yet, maybe it’s going to hit me. I don’t know. Maybe Mother is just lowering a rope ladder down the pit to me, so that when the enormity of what’s happened kicks in properly, I’ll have something to cling on to.

  “And by the way, dear, I’ve been thinking.”

  “What?”

  “I’m going to make you an offer you can’t refuse.”

  “Go on.”

  “Two hundred thousand for the apartment.”

  I stare at her, aghast.

  “This apartment?”

  “Take it or leave it,” she says.

  A day in December

  59

  There’s no doubt about it.

  It is who I think it is.

  Ambling through the park.

  Here I am, standing on the roof garden of my apartment, hanging up clothes to dry on this cold and breezy winter morning. I’m extracting damp shirts and tops, and other exquisite articles, from a basket squatted on top of a stool. When suddenly this apparition drops from the sky.

  Everything stops. I was just on the point of attaching a peg to the second trouser leg, so right now an idle peg is sticking from my fingers like a duck’s beak ready to bite.

  It seems to be a pattern in my life: things are cruising along just nicely when without warning I’m struck by an avalanche of bad luck.

  I am jinxed from birth. I must be. In my body is a constellation of stellar minerals whose cumulative magnetic effect is to attract all the woe of the world – but precisely at that point in time when things in my life appear to be running nice and smoothly.

  Suddenly the avalanche of bad luck starts waving.

  Feeling like I’ve just been shot at, I turn my back and pin up the second trouser leg like I didn’t notice a thing, hoping the move looked convincing.

  Will I ever be free?

  First, the innocence and peace of your childhood destroyed by your father’s affair. Then you and your mother together pick up the pieces, worn and brittle and blood-and-tear-stained, and you live out the rest of your adolescence in a meteorological depression of the soul – but at least without a man to stymie it up on you.

  Then you go to college and meet one.

  You meet one and marry your addiction, and live on a high for a few years, plan babies and suddenly you discover he’s been doing the dirty on you. You take a nosedive. You try to cope, to rehabilitate, to forget – and what happens?

  Your front doorbell rings.

  I don’t want to know.

  I extract a soggy white top from the basket and attach it to the line by two further pegs. I like pegs in winter: they don’t carry tiny spiders that spin webs on your clothes line to trap unsuspecting miniature airborne wildlife. I have a phobia about cobwebs and all they imply.

  The bell rings again.

 
; I don’t want to know.

  I feel like a seagull with a broken wing, but that’s okay. That’s okay because my wings are getting stronger by the week and even if I can’t yet spin in the air, or do a loop, or a roll, or a dive, or astronavigate the heavens like an eagle, I can at least parachute to safety if I get a sudden blackout and hide in a corner like a fragile kitten, and Sylvana and Mother will be there with their conjoint fat feline tongues to wrap me in a protective layer of their dripping saliva.

  The very knowledge that this particular contribution to my emotional welfare is at all times forthcoming makes me certain that I will make it through this dark night of the soul.

  Saint Julie of the Cross.

  But still.

  Still, I’m not strong. I’m still not fully myself. I might be strong enough to cruise in the sky, but only at low altitude. I’m still in constant danger of getting splatted against a chimney, or sprangled against a TV mast, or sliced in half by a cable, or scraped by a treetop or cymballed by a satellite dish (Feng Shui is quite right about the negative effects of satellite dishes). I am still fearful of getting nauseous and passing out as I fly through the septic urban air but my parachute fails to open, so I just get splodged on to the pavement like a grave of dogshit and never reawaken to immortalize the memory.

  This, precisely, is the reason I do not want to answer the door.

  The bell rings a third time.

  I just want this interference to go away and leave me in peace. I will survive just fine, provided people whom I’d rather see frozen in a glass cabinet and dispatched to Mars would not decide suddenly to reappear in avalanche form.

  I extract a clump consisting of three pairs of frilly white knickers from the washing basket and hang them up in turn, deeming each one no more deserving than a single peg.

  It’s been truly awful for the last six months. Why do you think Sylvana and Mother still take it in turns to sleep over? Because I’m back on the rails?

  Clearly it’s because they still don’t trust me not to end it all in a bubble bath. I have been a burden on them, a blight in their lives. Like a street littered with misery, they’ve been picking me up whenever I was down. At one point it got so bad that I begged Sylvana to leave me alone and not stay over any more. Because if I hated what I was doing to myself, I hated even more what I was doing to her. But, like all great friends, she refused to listen.