“I feel like the garden’s coming together at last. It’s been such a nightmare trying to get a gardener who knows his arse from his elbow. Or his Alchemilla from his Echinacea, so to speak.”
“You could have a garden filled with Astroturf for all it matters to me. It’s having Gabe taken care of by your very capable nanny that’s the real treat.” I look over to see one of the twins crying and Gabe standing worryingly nearby. I choose to ignore the scene and instead look over to Mitzi. It’s remarkable how quickly you can get back to normal with someone who you’ve witnessed indulging in revolting marital peccadilloes.
“I do need to do some more pruning, though.”
I suppress a giggle. Well, almost back to normal.
“Thanks again for Norfolk.”
“It was fabulous, wasn’t it? We all had such a lovely time, didn’t we? I feel like you got to know Michael a bit better, too.”
“Yes, I feel like I’ve seen a lot more of Michael now.”
“He is unbelievable, isn’t he?”
“Yes. Unbelievable.”
“People are always amazed when they meet him because I think they’re expecting some sort of gone-to-seed banker type and there he is, so absurdly handsome.”
“Yes, he is very handsome. In an older man sort of way.”
Mitzi laughs. “He’s not that old.”
“He seems it. Not in a bad way, but in an authoritative way. I wouldn’t want to mess with him.”
“No, you really don’t want to mess with him. I think anyone he works with could tell you that. And how all the secretaries are all over him. I know that. I’m very lucky to have him. I’m really very lucky.”
“Yes, you’ve done well for yourself.”
I can’t read her eyes behind the designer sunglasses. I could swear she is looking for reassurance.
Mitzi’s mobile bleeps with a message. She picks it up and smiles. She opens the message and smiles even more. She sees me looking at her and blushes beneath her light tan.
“Who’s the message from?”
“No one.” She cannot suppress that smile. “A friend.”
“A very funny one, judging by your smirk.”
“I wouldn’t say funny. No, funny’s not their thing, not at all.” She’s still staring at the message. She uncrosses then crosses her legs. She puts down the phone and it reverts to its screensaver of all four of her children hugging and smiling. I can’t even get my measly two to smile at the same time.
“Damn it,” she says, scratching her head. “Radka,” she calls to the nanny. “Have you been nit-combing the children every day like I asked you to?” She turns to me. “Bloody nits, it’s disgusting, I just can’t seem to get them out of the kids’ hair. I suppose I should just shave their heads and be done with it, but they do all have such incredible hair, don’t they? I envy these parents whose kids have normal hair, but my children just have so much hair, it’s so thick, there’s so much of it. It takes Radka an age to get through them all. Honest to god, I don’t know why we’re paying all this money out to that school for them to still come home with bloody nits.”
“I’m sorry, do you think they got them from mine?”
“Quite possibly. They’ve had them off and on for months.”
“Mine only got them after Norfolk, so it sounds more likely it was the other way around,” I say in defense. “And they don’t have them anymore. I got rid of them really quickly.” I glance over at Gabriel, whose head is bent toward Merle’s.
“It must be so much easier when your children have thin hair.”
“They’ve both got quite a lot, actually.”
“Of nits? Isn’t it horrendous? It makes my head itch to even think about it.”
“Do you think you’ve got them?” I ask, scratching my head in sympathy.
“Of course not! I’m sure I haven’t. Only children get them, like chicken pox.”
“I think the reason children get them is because they’re always in such close proximity to one another, which adults generally aren’t. If they come into your bed they could give them to you and I guess you could give them to Michael.”
“You don’t think I could have them, do you? I won’t be able to go to the hairdresser. Could you have a look for me? Oh, don’t actually, it’s too disgusting.”
“You could ask Michael to take a look.”
“God, no, I’d never ask Michael. How humiliating.”
But parading around in a crotchless French maid’s outfit and picking up his shit is empowering? I nod, while thinking about how happily I could ask Joel to nit check my hair. In fact, I have done, on more than one occasion. “You could probably check it yourself—they go for the back of the neck, but also the bit at the front.” I gesture around my hairline, while squinting at hers.
“You do know a lot about it.”
I shrug.
“Excuse me,” she says and disappears to what estate agents call the “guest cloakroom.”
Gabe is pulling the petals off roses. I’m about to warn him about thorns when I change my mind. It will serve him right. Mitzi has left her phone on the ground; I can reach it without getting off my seat. I look over at Radka, who has now taken the three children off to the trampoline hidden by a parterre at the bottom of the garden. I look back toward the house and then down at the phone again. If I’m quick.
It’s a new-fangled one with a thousand applications. Text, text, text? I look back toward the house again. Why is it so complicated? Text, here, inbox, last message, from “Gardener.” Gardener? I open it up. “3 it is. Have lube, vib, fist. Now u.”
Are these horticultural references? I put the phone back where I found it. She did say it was hard to find a good gardener these days.
“Find anything?” I ask Mitzi. “In your hair?”
“I wasn’t really looking. Did I tell you I’ve got to be somewhere at three?”
“No, you didn’t.”
“Sorry. I can’t really get out of it.”
“No problem. I’ve got to pick up Rufus anyway. Anywhere nice?”
“No, boring, dental work. Harley Street.”
No it’s not, I’m thinking. Is she having an affair with her gardener? What next, the plumber?
The plumber. Of course, the plumber. I look at Mitzi and cannot help but let out a little gasp of realization. The plumber and the gardener. Mitzi and Cara. It’s so obvious. Of course, it’s Mitzi and Cara. The lesbian who can’t resist married women and the married woman who can’t resist a novelty. Mitzi would never be so unoriginal as to have an affair with a man. There would be no point to that. She needs the opposite of a man, the opposite of Michael and all his alpha maleness. She wanted an anti-man—in the same way, I suppose, that I did, for very different reasons.
It’s so obvious that I feel like hitting my forehead and shouting “Doh!” The walk, in Norfolk, Mitzi went instead of me. Cara was courting us both. She was probably even playing us off against each other. The nits. Becky’s head-scratching. It wasn’t a psychological tic, she really does have an itchy head. Mitzi bloody does have nits and she’s given them to Cara who’s given them to poor guiltless Becky, like some sort of pre-school version of syphilis in an Ibsen play. And that picture of the hairless vagina, that scar was from a cesarean. Mitzi had to have one because one of the twins was in a transverse lie (after breezing through her previous births saying they didn’t hurt a bit because of all the yoga she’d done). Only someone as unself-consciously vain as Mitzi would ever take a photo of her vagina and send it on to her lover. Everyone else would assume theirs was too ugly, like their knees or feet. Cara is pleasuring Mitzi and vice versa. I feel a pang of envy at this point and a small twinge. A sadness that it will never happen, followed by relief at avoiding the scary prospect of fisting, a practice I’ve not given too much thought to, but which does make me instinctively cross my legs. I can only presume that it is not something for a first date and that Becky was right, this has been going on for a while. I wonder wh
ether it happened on the marshes of Norfolk, when Mitzi was there instead of me. Is that when it started, before my martini night with Cara, or was it later, after I had disappointed her? Who was Cara’s first choice? Did they walk out in the early Norfolk morning and lie down amid the long seagrass, hidden from dog walkers and the children making first expeditions to the beach? Who made the first move? Did they only kiss or did the taste of Mitzi mingle with the saltiness of the air? Was that grass scratchy? Would it all have been different if I hadn’t overslept that morning?
“So I’d better go and get myself ready in about ten minutes,” Mitzi says.
“For the dentist?”
“You know how it is, you feel you’d better give yourself an extra-vigilant floss when you see the dentist.”
“Yes, a floss,” I nod. She looks so happy that her skin is glowing as if she’s just come back from a long walk in the country. She looks like she used to look, when we first met. I thought it was age and the gym that had hardened her face, but it was Michael.
“Mitzi?”
“Yes.”
“Completely and utterly hypothetically, would you ever leave Michael?”
“No, of course not. What do you mean?”
“I mean, if he wanted you to do something horrible or if he treated you badly in some way, would you leave him? I mean, I know he wouldn’t, he’s great, obviously, but are you one of these people who would stay with their husband, whatever?”
“I would always stay.”
“Whatever?”
“I don’t know what the whatever you might be thinking of is, but yes. Infidelity I could cope with, I’m sure we’d manage with less money, we understand one another. I really can’t imagine anything that would make me think it was worth upsetting my children’s lives over. You know about my childhood, don’t you, about my mother? Why would I ever contemplate bringing even a small fraction of that sort of instability into this…” she gestures toward the house and the garden “… into this life I’ve worked so hard to create?”
“Of course.” She is the stylist, her children the props and her life is a six-page spread in a glossy magazine. How could she bear to let it be seen to be anything less than perfect?
“I’d better get going with my flossing.” She smiles, displaying her already perfect teeth.
“Yes, you’d better. Gabe, five minutes, then we’re going. Good luck at the dentist’s. Hope it’s not too painful,” I say, “at the dentist’s.”
The List has become so complicated with plus and minus points that I am finding I need to update it at least every night. I am just delving into the “general ineptitude” section to cross-reference the right numbers on my spreadsheet.
These are all interconnected with various points in the “finance” section, related as they are to his inability to do his expenses and his lack of comprehension that if he pays out money in the course of his work, if he gets it back it is not “free money” that he doesn’t really have a right to receive. As I’m doing so, I notice I15.
Doesn’t put cordless phone back on its cradle.
I don’t remember adding that one. It’s a crime that Joel’s always accusing me of—unfairly, since I barely ever use our landline.
The clutter has finally reached the biannual point at which I start screaming that I can’t stand it, you hear me? I can’t stand it any longer, I’m going mad, mad I tell you, and Joel takes the boys out on an expensive and sugar-fueled trip to a tourist attraction in order that I have a mammoth session of identifying toy parts and clearing out cupboards. When he bumps into anyone we know on these trips, he’ll always tell them that he’s doing it “to give Mary a break” or to “let Mary do her thing” and they sigh with admiration at him.
I look forward to these cleansing Sundays, though am left disappointed by the fact that I never achieve all that I had hoped and my life is not left magically improved by a temporarily ordered toy cupboard.
My menfolk venture forth into the outside world armed with nothing but a pair of juice cartons and a bag of dried apricots, while I survey the home front. It takes at least half an hour of my precious declutter Sunday to tidy up after breakfast, followed by a guilty fifteen minutes reading the paper. I can then put it off no longer and, rejecting the temptation to start off with something easy and entirely selfish like my wardrobe, head for the area behind the television. Or to give it its correct title, the Area Behind the Television, to convey the full screaming-strings-from-Psycho horror of the most neglected and terrifying trouble spot in our home.
There are stacks of CD cases and an equally large one of loose CDs. I begin to try to match these two piles, but there seems to be no correlation between them so I give up and throw them all into a plastic box which will go to the purgatory of our attic. I then start on the books, becoming absorbed in a radio program as I try to put them back into their alphabetized homes. Unfortunately the pile includes ones by Amis, Ballard and Cartwright, which means that all the McEwans, Rushdies and Tylers have to be correspondingly shifted along to create spare acres of shelf in the earlier parts of the alphabet.
I move onto the box sets of DVDs, most of which we’ve only ever got halfway through after gorging night after night on the early episodes of whatever quality American import we’re currently watching in order to pretend that we still have some grip on popular culture. I stand up to stretch my back and contemplate making myself a cup of tea, but then realize that I’ll never get back to the hellhole of forgotten possessions if I allow such distractions. I purse my mouth in determination at my next and most horrific task: the video cassettes. Technology is conspiring against me to create endless graveyards of discarded plastic. I make a pile of the dozen or so cassettes and grapple with the red and blue cables behind the television to reconnect our old video player. I feel a small pang of nostalgia as I remember the excitement that my family felt when we bought our first video recorder, one using the Betamax format.
If I can get the video to work, I can play these old three-hour cassettes. And if I can do that, I can put them into two piles. One will be for cassettes with contents worth saving, which I’ll take into work to be transferred onto DVD. The second pile is for the black bin liner, to be discarded like a dumpy first wife. And if I do that I can get rid of the video recorder, which means there will be two fewer cables. Two fewer cables until we give in and buy some sort of games console for the boys.
Bingo, it works. The first cassette has a few old episodes of once loved and now fuzzy with age television programs. The second is, marvelously, our wedding video, shot by a mutual friend we used to work with, a constant presence in our lives for a period of two years but now as obsolete as a VHS tape, seeing as how he still gets drunk, takes drugs and has one-night stands. I wonder what has become of him. It’s not so much the director’s cut as the director’s half cut, since the footage mostly consists of some zoom-ins to pretty female guests’ cleavages and some wobbly ones of our speeches.
The next three go into the bin bag. There’s one marked “Bob Dylan.” I’m about to throw it straightaway when I think I’d better check, just in case. I hate Bob Dylan. All the whining. I realized early on in my dating career that it’s best to keep one’s dislike of Bob Dylan and his fellow moaners (I’m talking about you, Leonard Cohen) quiet. There’s a certain sort of man of a certain sort of age who feels personally wounded if you say you just don’t get the point of Bob Dylan.
The screen is fuzzy, then a handwritten board appears, reading “Mary Homesick Blues.” I watch on to see Joel standing at the side of the black-and-white screen, holding a pile of placards. He’s thinner than he is now and I recognize the sweater he’s wearing as one that has long since disintegrated to the point where it bypassed even the charity shop. As the music plays, he begins to throw down these placards one by one, in homage to that famous Dylan video. They are all handwritten in curly marker pen and Joel discards each one with the same mock disdain that Bob displays in the original, but there’s no hid
ing a nervousness in his face. I read the placards that he holds aloft in sequence.
“Mary” says the first.
“I’m happy” says the second.
“With you.”
“And very unhappy”
“Without you.”
“You’re too funny and clever”
“For me.”
“But even so”
“Will you”
“Marry me?”
I bring my hands up to my mouth, which is smiling, and I feel my eyes well up. I feel a little fraction of what I would have felt if Joel had played me this video, or let me find this video, back when we weren’t married. All that resentment I felt at him never asking and the shambolic way we got engaged could have been avoided. This was the Proposal Story that I had longed for, that would have been in keeping with our courtship. Bless him, I think; though I am not religious, I want to touch his forehead with balm. Watching this video awakens in me a surge of the tenderness I used to feel toward him every moment of every day, that mixture of wanting to hug him like a child and to have him screw me hard against a kitchen unit. We were so young and he was so handsome. He is still—paused on the screen—and I yearn to rewind our life and stop it right there. Our world felt like a perpetual Friday afternoon of anticipation and excitement, instead of today’s permanent Sunday evening. I ring his mobile.
“I’m just tidying up behind the television.”
“Not behind the television.”
“And I just found your Bob Dylan video.”
“Uh-huh.”
“You know, with the proposal.” I want to have some of the moment that we would have had back then and to have it now.
“Right. Gabe, stay near me. It’s Mommy on the phone. Do you want to speak to her? Don’t, then.”
“When did you make it?”
“I don’t know. About six months before we decided to get married.”
The Pile of Stuff at the Bottom of the Stairs Page 26
