The Faithful Couple

by A. D. Miller

  By the time the Look! No notepad! waitress brought the ironic fortune cookies, Neil was tired and anyway doubtful of his chances. Roxanna’s cookie advised her that, To give, you must first receive.

  Neil cracked his cookie, looked down at the slip of paper and up at Roxanna. ‘It says here,’ he said, boredom and loneliness welling up as audacity, ‘that tonight I’m going to have sex with a stranger.’

  Her eyes widened, she fixed them on the napkin across her knees. For a moment Neil thought she was going to leave, or to slap him.

  She said, ‘Come with me for a cigarette?’

  She didn’t smoke. On the way to the exit she steered him into one of the trendily unisex washrooms, pinning him between the rectangular marble sink and the door as it closed behind them. Neil felt at once decadent, worldly, like a desperado in a war zone, and embarrassingly teenaged. He had grown accustomed to the idea that some women might find him attractive: his weight was stable, ditto his hairline, as if protracted negotiations between him and it had established an agreed frontier. Money’s gloss invisibly burnished his pale skin. But this woman, here, hitching up her skirt in a toilet stall?

  The circumstances didn’t inhibit her as to volume. She pushed a knuckle into his anus as he thrusted.

  Dominic smirked at Neil when they returned to the table. Tony pretended he hadn’t seen them. It was only the second time in his life that he had been so reckless. There was suicidal indifference in the recklessness, and also something like the opposite, a roulette spin for a richer life.

  Understanding that this beginning could drive them apart they never mentioned it. She emailed; they went out for dinner without colleagues or sex, at the restaurant or afterwards, as if Roxanna were an ancient goddess who might magically have her virginity restored. Her parents had fled Tehran for England during the revolution, she told him. They moved to America while she was at university, separating not long afterwards, but she had stayed in London. She was thirty-five: one careful owner, like him, Neil concluded from oblique references to her romantic past.

  He went to Zurich, on to Singapore, and didn’t see her for two weeks. The third time, at a restaurant in Notting Hill, she announced that she had something to tell him. That’s it, Neil thought.

  ‘Neil, I’m pregnant. I’m pregnant, Neil.’ Once-in-a-lifetime news, but no other way than just to say it.

  You used something, right?

  I’ll take care of it.

  He managed not to ask either Is it mine? or Are you going to keep it?, a double feat of self-restraint for which he was afterwards grateful. Her grin suggested that the second question would in any case have been redundant. His stomach sank, but he sensed another part of him levitating, taking off.

  You could have a kid out there, you know.

  They agreed that they would wait before she moved in but they didn’t. After all he was alone in that overwhelming apartment, with Sam for the odd weekend. She could always move out again, they told each other. For New Year’s Eve they went to Bilbao, dancing to a street band in the alleys of the old town. The first time the doll-sized knee or elbow poked at him through her belly, Neil felt as if he could fly; her new anatomy became so familiar to him, swelled so incrementally, that it came to seem this bloated form was the end-point, her finished state, rather than a beginning. He turned forty shortly before the baby was due, feeling that a lot of his life was behind him, and that little of that life was his.

  They called her Leila. Neil was fascinated by her skin tone, which was neither Roxanna’s nor his but a golden hybrid of her own. He convinced himself that he could glimpse his mother in her brow and around her eyes. He tried to imagine his mother as a grandparent, but he knew the speculation was a lie, that he couldn’t ever know how she would have been. They enlisted a night nurse, a Ukrainian named Olesya, whom Tony had recommended. Olesya was pretty, defeatedly overweight, discreetly religious (Orthodox crucifix, mumbled imprecations, homeland pain written into the creases on her forehead and at the corners of her mouth).

  Roxanna was in bed. Leila was asleep on his chest, her four limbs bent under her like a frog’s. Olesya lifted the weightless body off him and ushered Neil out of the flat, shooing him away with a wise smile and a broken-English instruction to ‘Go your friends.’

  To begin with he didn’t quite admit where he was heading. He pretended to himself that he was only driving. It was a cold grey night with a starless London sky. He drove across town, to the back of the pub in Southwark where he had first met Claire, after that to the end of Westminster Bridge that abutted the bowling arcade and the still-spinning wheel. He drove along the Strand, looking for the doorway they had shared with those Australian girls, he couldn’t remember their names, his and Adam’s alternate secret, which hadn’t been enough. On his homeward loop he trawled the road at the back of Paddington Station to find the café in which he and Adam had sat, sussing out where they stood, whether the other was real, at their first meeting in England. Adam had worn his ridiculous cap.

  The locations didn’t tally with Neil’s memories. Thinking about the nineties, the images came back to him washed-out and grimy: brown food and miserabilist films, boxy cars and chewing gum on the pavement, the streets in the centre of town streamed in filth, the rubbish bins removed lest terrorists stash bombs in them. In Neil’s mind the contrast between that time and neon now replayed Dorothy’s transition from dowdy Kansas to Technicolor Munchkinland. Scanning the unfamiliar shopfronts, Neil reckoned that the café had become an oyster bar. The airline office was now a high-concept fast-fooderie, he thought.

  So inconsiderate, these changes. How were you ever supposed to find your way back, recover your old you, when the city was so different, as different, almost, as you were? You needed your own private London, preserved in formaldehyde, an archipelago museum of your imperishable moments. Instead your places were bulldozed and replaced with someone else’s memories.

  I’m going crazy, Neil thought, as he sat in his car, half mounted on the pavement, being hooted by taxi drivers, stalking a bar that had once been a café in which, a long time before, he had talked with a man who used to be his friend. A friend he hadn’t seen for three years.

  ‘I’m going crazy,’ he said out loud. ‘Sorry,’ he said to no one, and to Adam, and to Rose, and drove himself back to Bayswater.

  ***

  There was the usual rigmarole of pretending he might go back to sleep without relieving himself. Perhaps if he lay on his other side, or curled up, like this… Finally Adam levered himself out of bed, as quietly as he could, his senses muted as if he were underwater, eyes outraged at being called upon to open, and, when they did, reporting an unfamiliar room, doors and windows bafflingly transposed, so that for a moment he wondered whether he was dreaming. The croaking of frogs outside the window tipped him off. His brain cranked up, and he padded to the cork-floored bathroom between their room and the children’s. The door snapped shut, too loudly. Adam swore, counterproductively, but no one seemed to wake.

  He had a challenging nocturnal erection. Sighing, he throttled his penis with his right hand, gripped the towel rail with his left, preparing to double over, as if he were executing a dive with pike – a fraught manoeuvre, but the surest way, when he was engorged, to avoid spraying urine across the seat and onto the floor, which would result in either an icky clean-up now or, if he neglected that courtesy, a bollocking from Claire in the morning. He bent his dick through another ten degrees, the organ bucking and resisting, and swore again.

  The latch clicked as the bathroom door reopened. Adam straightened up and turned round, still clutching the angry penis, the look on his face on the cusp between ecstasy and excruciation.

  ‘Oh,’ Claire said. ‘Oh, Adam.’

  He followed her gaze to his genitals. So far it hadn’t caused him much trouble, this penis. Less than he might have expected. Less grief than Neil’s had caused them.

  ‘It isn’t what you think,’ Adam said, releasing his grip. ‘Clezzy
, really. It’s… I’m just trying to piss.’

  Claire hesitated for a moment before acquiescing with a sleepy smile. She squeezed past him to the toilet, naked, yawning as she peed, wiping herself robotically. The trust that they had almost lost had come back to them.

  ‘Well,’ she said, standing up. ‘We’re awake now.’

  She took hold of the penis with one hand, made a shush sign with the other, and led him silently back to bed.

  Three years before, as open-mindedly as he could, Adam had considered the possibility that he found the thought of Claire and Neil arousing. Briefly he wondered whether he might be on the high road to a life of orgies in south London warehouses (like the ones that, so one of the secretaries told him on his second day in the office, Hardy liked to attend), where he would be locked in a cage to watch while strangers fucked his wife. That wasn’t it, he soon decided; he was as vanilla in his lusts as in his other tastes. Her brush with Neil had been a jolt rather than a turn-on, more medical than erotic, mild electrotherapy administered to a struggling heart. Or perhaps it was simply a coincidence when, a few weeks later – weeks of him ruminating on car journeys, his jaw grinding ominously, Claire glancing at him in silence as Harry and Ruby garrotted each other in the back – their sex life came back to them, too, like a rediscovered hobby. That summer they were anyway emerging from the tunnel of the children’s infancy: the phase of repurposed bodies and burgled privacy, of holidays that were marathons of arse-wiping and miscalculated discipline, their sexual punctuation being, if Adam were lucky, one perfunctory, grisly hand-job. The mutual neglect that began as a necessity and developed into a stand-off. They blinkingly began to see each other again.

  Claire had crow’s feet around her eyes and her flesh was – not flabbier, but somehow more yielding than it once had been. Adam’s fingers sunk into her rather than stopping at her surface. She was still a beautiful woman, more beautiful, to him, because of what he had seen her body do. That same summer, after a decade of ordering grown-up drinks, or drinking nothing, she reverted to the alcosyrups she had preferred when they met, ginger wine and pina coladas and fuck-it Malibu and pineapples. The time poverty of parenthood had made her more decisive and demanding – in restaurants, in negotiations with telephone salespeople, in bed, where she directed his hands briskly or deployed her own.

  Adam had kept his hair and, more or less, his looks. The sagging jowls had reconsidered and tightened back, the skin of his face coming to seem stretched and weather-beaten. When he looked in the mirror he had begun to see his father peering back at him, like an actor through his make-up.

  The revived desire that his wife stirred felt like its own kind of transgression. Adam was freshly grateful to the him who had met and kept hold of her, and the him who had forgiven her for that nothing.

  Afterwards he spooned her, clasping both of her breasts in one of his palms. ‘Love you,’ he said.

  ‘Go back to sleep,’ Claire said.

  The trust had come back, but he hadn’t told her about Yosemite. That would always be just between them.

  ‘Up you get,’ Ruby said, hurdling onto their bed. ‘Beach time, lazyboneses.’

  ‘I already told her, it’s the castle today,’ Harry said from the doorway. ‘The one with the tree house, you know. It’s definitely my turn, she chose yesterday.’

  ‘Me too,’ Ruby said. ‘But it’s the beach first. Please, Daddy.’

  Adam hesitated. ‘Tell you what,’ Claire ruled, her toenails digging into his calf beneath the bed covers, ‘we’ll go to the beach, but’ – she raised her voice above their son’s objection – ‘we’ll go to that place you like for dinner, where the man gave you the sparklers.’

  ‘I suppose,’ Harry said.

  Adam drew his daughter to him. Ruby submitted, but passively, only half present in the embrace. Seven already: the years in which she needed to be as close to them as she could as often as she could, to be piggybacked and tickled and enfolded, her marsupial years, were drawing to an end. Adam felt a pang of unbereaved mourning.

  They dressed and drove to the lake. The sand was greyish, the water was silty and cold, the rocks where the sand and water met encased in slimy, emerald weeds that were unpleasant and hazardous to walk on. With a seven-year-old’s talent for suspending disbelief, Ruby was in her swimsuit, across the beach and into the water before her parents had slipped off their shoes. She buried her face as she front-crawled, as her instructor had taught her.

  ‘You haven’t got any sun cream on!’ Adam called after her.

  ‘Daddy,’ Ruby called back. ‘Stop worrying.’

  Adam splashed in. He threw Ruby into the air, never quite relinquishing control of the slippery limbs as her compact body rose and fell. ‘Higher,’ Ruby shrieked.

  Harry joined them, shouting, ‘Do it to me!’ He and Adam raced, caressed underwater by shadowy tendrils, Ruby clinging to her father’s throat. Adam stood her in the shallows and waded back to demonstrate his butterfly stroke, splashing around like a demented walrus to small locomotive but great comic effect – the move a straight lift from his father’s summer playbook, which was itself, he had inferred, a daguerreotype of his father’s father’s, and so on and on, back and back, probably, to some exhibitionist Tudor moat swimmer, the parenting tactics encoded and passed on like eye colour or high blood pressure.

  Playing in the water with his children, Adam’s mind went back to their peace lunch at the Chelsea fish restaurant several months before, the last time he had seen his father. It wasn’t the adult thing to do, he knew, it was gauche and unsophisticated, but he had mentioned his mother once, twice, how she was staying with her sister, how she worried about Harriet, in her squat with her punky German boyfriend, somewhere in east London.

  Jeremy Tayler had pressed his fingers to his temples, eyes fixed on the menu, silent. ‘Asparagus,’ he finally said, looking up. ‘Then sole meunière. No, bonne femme.’

  Anger had welled up in Adam, for his mother and also for himself, a kind of buyer’s remorse. All that happiness, that enervating, debilitating happiness, which had turned out to be a lie. That had been another kind of bereavement, for the life he thought they had all shared. Later Adam noticed his father appraise the waitress’s arse, as she bent to sweep the tablecloth with an accessory like a cut-throat razor.

  ‘Daddy?’ Ruby said.

  She was kneeling in the shallows, recycling the murky water that lapped into her mouth, accustomed to going about her business while the adult worked through his or her distraction, emails, text messages.

  ‘Sorry,’ Adam said. ‘Don’t drink it, sweetheart.’

  He pictured his mother’s pursed mouth as she applied the sun cream to him and Harriet, her firm, methodical strokes, only now intuiting the contest of devotion and boredom, and the other, veiled resentments that must have engraved her concentrating frown. Harriet had submitted herself obediently, he recalled, but he had always wriggled away ungratefully, desperate to show their father a dive, or how long he could hold his breath.

  Fathers.

  ‘Again the buttercup,’ Ruby said.

  ‘All right,’ Adam said. ‘Just once.’

  He splashed the children as he launched himself into his stroke; they splashed him back. In the end the three of them slipped back across the rocks. Claire distributed towels for the children to dry themselves.

  Along the beach three old men were playing dominoes underneath a sun umbrella. A thin man and fat woman were holding hands. Snatches of music drifted over from the open-air café. Adam remembered reading an interview in the paper with some septuagenarian film director, a Spanish or Italian man, describing how, one morning in old age, lust had left him, and how light he felt without it, as if he had been tethered to a goat for sixty years and suddenly cut loose. Adam was beginning to feel like that, but about ambition rather than his libido. This wasn’t quite the life he expected, but what right, really, did he ever have to his hopes? They made enough money, just about. You never knew,
they told each other, the business Claire was starting might take off, stranger things, the usual. Claire, the children, the nineteenth-century history books that he read on the commuter train from High Wycombe, a train on which, almost every day, he got a seat.

  Hardy was the secretaries’ nickname for Alan, the shorter and fatter of his two bosses. Alan/Hardy had a Humpty Dumpty belly that he attempted to corset in a self-mortifying belt. He dyed his hair a rusty orange and signed his name with an overcompensating flourish, his insecurities so flagrant that they were hard to resent. Laurel (Craig) was taller, an inexpert shaver who wore ill-fitting clothes, as if he were dressed by a hard-up mother who was keeping him in hand-me-downs until he finished growing. He had an absent, scholarly air that, so the secretaries whispered, concealed an actuarial coldness when it came to cutting people loose. ‘P45 you as soon as look at you,’ one of them said.