by Martin Roper
—You know what Medbh told me men want, Ursula?
—Tell me Stephen, what did Medbh tell you men want?
—Three things: To be fed from time to time, a good blow job, and never to be made look silly in public or talked about behind their backs.
—That’s four.
—I didn’t give a fuck about the book. I was supporting you.
—You lied. Arguments should be based on facts.
—That’s the mistake women make in arguments with men. You think we work on logic. You can’t beat men with logic. Men make the illogical sound logical. Get over it. But hey, if you want facts, we’ll live on facts. We will live with facts. Never expect me to defend you again. Never, never expect my trust. The trailing unspoken ends of sentences. The ones that count.
* * *
It wasn’t out of spite, the first affair with the Italian. It was more mundane and more pathetic. I still had acne and the need to be alluring when Ursula wouldn’t look at me let alone touch me was important. Her name was Isobela and she didn’t care I was married and neither did I. Ultimately I was alone. Didn’t have the courage then to leave. Name that tune. It was not just a matter of courage; I felt I had to stand by her until we sold the house. I was flattered by the attention of the Italian and excited to meet a woman who had no qualms about being unfaithful to her husband. It was reassuring to have some laughter, some pleasure in life, no matter if it was wrong to betray Ursula. I wanted to live fully, as fully as the characters in the books I had read. I was gaining experience in the world and I knew the affair with Isobela would move me to act.
I met her at the Fellini festival at the Screen Cinema on D’Olier Street. She asked me for fire. I’ve heard Italians stop someone in the street since and ask for it and it sounds like practiced ignorance to beguile the natives but back then I didn’t know a whole lot about anything. I told her she couldn’t smoke in the cinema and she just smiled and wiggled her thumb in front of her cigarette as if it was a lighter and I lit it. I stared at the picture but wasn’t able to concentrate. I could only be aware of her sitting beside me, smoking. After the picture was over we sat there while everyone else left and I turned and asked her out. We went across to what was then the Regency bar and had a drink. We gesticulated and laughed a lot. She was only three days in the country and had little English. She was reading Ulysses in Italian and when I told her it must be a hard book she didn’t know what hard meant. I tapped the counter. Wood, she asked, raising her eyebrows. The way she raised her eyebrows, the charm of her befuddlement. She was flirting and making it clear she was flirting. She told me about her husband and somehow made it clear it was unimportant. She talked of him as if he was an aged relative. I couldn’t talk of Ursula in the same way. I didn’t want to talk of her at all. We went back into the pictures and watched another Fellini. The lights went down and she took my hand. My hand was sweating with nerves. After a while she pulled my hand down between her legs but I pulled it back. I couldn’t do that, not here. She leaned over and said something to me in Italian and kissed me. Her hand was between my legs. Hard, she whispered, unzipping my trousers. There is nothing to compare to a woman’s knowing mouth. I will take the memory of her lips to my grave.
* * *
I tried to write a story to make some meaning out of it. A young man fantasises about being with a beautiful woman he sees on the street. He takes the thought home with him and is rudely interrupted by his bawling baby and frazzled wife, Ulrika (I couldn’t get away from the U). He doesn’t have an affair. Instead he helps his wife to soothe the child. He realises how he has begun to look at his wife as a burden and how quickly they have grown apart. They go to bed. He has a nightmare and wakes up and realises the baby is screaming. In the last sentences of the story he gets out of bed and goes to the child:
I cradled our baby in my arms. “I’m so sorry,” I whispered to her pudgy face. I brought her into the bedroom and sat beside Ulrika. Her face carried hours of exhaustion.
“I love you,” I said.
She reached a hand out to mine and squeezed it. I stared at her, waiting. She said nothing.
“Really, Ulrika. I love you.”
“Yes,” she said.
What literature has lost. I was looking for some kind of understanding and forgiveness in the story I knew I would not find in life, not that I understood why I was writing what I was writing beyond the feeling of being trapped yet scared of freedom. Looking for a truth in fiction to deny the lie in reality, perhaps. In the midst of all this, Gerry phoned. He had emigrated to New York. He was drunk. He had work for a good painter. Big money. Ursula told me to take the opportunity but I didn’t want to leave her alone in the house. She laughed and said it would be different if it was the other way around. She wouldn’t want to leave me alone in the house. So I phoned Gerry and told him as soon as the house was sold I would come over. My protestations about staying were not honest. There was never any doubt that I would go just as there was no doubt that she would leave town if an assignment beckoned.
* * *
We are painting the house and can hear the music from the concert in Lansdowne Road. I am rolling the ceiling and she is doing the walls. I want it all to last as it was. With the cats and the roses and the sun on the bed in the morning. The sleepy slosh of her early morning piss. Driving her into the office. Letting her off in Baggot Street at the Turbine. Kissing. There would always be one last thing to say. I love you, I would say and she would smile a gluttonous smile and slam the car door with the noise of Dublin swirling around her. I would watch her in the quietness of the car. I would stare after her, waiting for her to turn. I was caressed with her through all the long day.
One morning, after I let her out at the corner, I see her wave to a man with a heavy duffel bag hanging off his shoulder. He is confident, easygoing. The way he carries himself. He smiles at her and she smiles back. The exchange flashes like a knife. She reaches into her briefcase and hands him a copy of her book. He shrugs and smiles at something she says and I sit there in the idling car wondering what she has to say to a man I don’t know that could make him shrug and smile. He reads the blurb on the back of the book and hands it back. She bursts out laughing and slaps him on the arm. The horrible ease she has with him. Jealousy grips me and I have a stomach-churning insight of what she would feel if she found out about Isobela. You moral, Isobela said. We pray for Pope. We do not listen him.
I park the car and walk through Merrion Square, through the Lincoln Gate at Trinity, pass the chapel where Brefini and Medbh got married. They had said they would never marry—we listened to them rant about primitive Ireland, and then we watched them, as if in a surreal cartoon, marry and have Una and forget all the talk of changing the world. We had bought them a fridge that made its own ice cubes and they thanked us, missing our extravagant joke. Already their life was swallowed with baby burps and hoping the car would start in the morning. Getting married took the stress out of making the decision not to get married that they were making every day, Medbh said.
* * *
In the end I ran, not just from Ursula but from the crude trap of Dublin. The Tuesday before I left I told Medbh I was running. Sometimes you need to run. Perhaps it’s the only way to face your demon, we all have a demon, only one if we’re lucky. I can smell salt water when I think of what she said. Walking the pier in Irishtown. A boisterous day, the wind fighting with itself. Halfway down the pier, the heavens opened. We ran for the lighthouse.
I get up before Ursula. While I am waiting for the kettle to boil I walk out into the cold garden, Vomit and Willy bouncing about my feet. Full of meows and the happiness of morning. We have to let the little bastards out to empty their bladders—they still haven’t worked out the cat flap. Rain during the night. Darkness loosening itself from a dirty sky. The absorbing silence of the city not yet awake. A bicycle squishes down the greasy hill. Then the dull plock of a tennis ball. They’re starting early this year. The whack of a ball struck, the
rattle of the protective wire between the end of the back garden and the courts. A ball lodged high up in one of the wire diamonds like an egg stuck in a startled mouth. A man’s laughter from the tennis court. Willy scales to the top of the fencing to investigate. The kettle whistles and I go in and turn it off before it wakes her. Vomit sits on the builder’s cement mixer, staring at her sister.
I blink with pleasure at the memory of her warm body, lost to sleep. Too early to wake her. I tap the foul-smelling cat food into the kittens’ bowls and they race each other to their breakfast as I go to the toilet. Odd she never flushes. It smells of her. I gaze abstractly out the window as I urinate. The tennis players are rallying heavily. The man crashes a ball against the top of the net, curses and sets off to retrieve the ball that is marking his defeat. His partner takes off her tracksuit bottoms, flattens out the creases from her tennis skirt, and shakes off a chill. She hops on the spot, waiting. Aggression twitches in her calf. She embodies a certain kind of woman: a woman who dislikes men and, in return, is adored. They pursue her, searching for the nugget of her allure. I dislike everything her taut body suggests. My blood rushes through me. I see myself lifting her tennis skirt and fucking her: a stiff penis has its own opinion. The idea of rape in every man. The first day I met Ursula. The way I had to pull my eyes away from her as she walked downstairs to the toilet in the Palace Bar. The sway of her stout buttocks under a white skirt. I felt naked in the pub, as if it was obvious that I was longing for the impossible. I remember not liking her entirely. I drank deeply then to steady the craving. The tennis ball thumps off the asphalt. Have to get dressed. It’s cold in the house. Tonight I’m cooking. The future wouldn’t happen. I want a child. The whack of the ball off the tennis racket. But not with her. I open my eyes and the world is too real, the way life always appears to be in the midst of misery or ecstasy, as if it’s happening to someone else. The sky stares at me indifferently. Cognitive dissonance. The presentation to the Japanese today. A child. The mirror stares at my stupidity. The Japanese won’t order, I know it, feel it in my water. The mattress moans with her shift.
* * *
We are having dinner. She is eating salad noisily. It was when I had begun to drink and had noticed it. Not so much that I noticed it but that she had stopped drinking. It was her way of telling me, of drawing attention to it. She had begun to know me, knew the way my temper flared with the breeze of her perceptiveness and so she said no, she would have no wine. For a while I cut back but then I weakened to opening a bottle at the end of the meal, then would rouse myself just before we started the salad. Finally I was reduced to glassfuls while we finished eating. During that dinner it’s obvious the marriage is slipping. It’s like the L on her typewriter that can’t bring itself to strike paper hard enough to make an impression. The harder the key is struck the fainter its outline. I wash back the anger; it swims in my ears. I stare out the window at the tarmac drive that runs up to the edge of the window. It’s always a shock to see the neighbour cut through the garden, her frail feet passing by at eye level. I breathe deeply and imagine her eating becoming sweet music. She must have always eaten that way. I get up abruptly from the table and leave the room to steady myself. She shouts after me. Do I want tea. Her voice eddies on the waves of anger I leave behind. The air is a favourite cup, broken. I come in after an hour’s walk and there is a mug of tea on the table with a saucer over it to keep it warm.
* * *
The smell of our sweat lost its passion. She no longer liked my smell about her nostrils. It all slipped between our hands. It was a long time happening (weeks, months, years?) but now it seems as fast as losing sight of a fish flipping in a river.
August: Summer trying to break out of a wet July. We are tiling in the bathroom upstairs. The telephone rings, we look at each other, at our hands covered in tiling cement. It’s Friday evening. Invariably the paper rings on Friday evening. Looking for her to go to Leopardstown to cover a race meeting. She must have been first on the list; the freelancer who drops her life in the sink to ask rich men stupid questions.
—Leave it.
She is wiping her hands clean.
—It might be the office.
—The office is why I don’t want you to pick it up.
The answering machine clicks on downstairs. Isobela’s voice. I make a U on the back of the tile and wipe it clean. The Italian voice is a fired gun to my ears. Ursula looks at me for an instant and I see suspicion coming into her eyes. She goes into the study next door, picks up the extension, and says hello and calmly, so calmly it startles me, Isobela says hello and asks if she may speak to her friend, Stephen. Stee-pen. I sit in the bath, staring at the half-finished wall listening to their voices echo up the stairs from the machine. Ursula puts the phone down and comes back in. I talk out of nervousness.
—Put the lid on the cement or it’ll harden.
* * *
I pick up the phone and my hello is the voice of the accused.
—Hi, Lover.
Isobela’s voice is a warm crumpled bed sheet. Life is falling away. I tell her I am busy doing the bathroom and make a joke about her voice echoing around the house as we speak. Guilt stiffens me. She talks about going back to Italy soon—I interrupt and tell her I’m going to New York. Her voice is assured and friendly. She brings the conversation to a silky end. Women are better liars. I put the phone down and wipe a smudge of cement off it. The courts are full now with Friday evening tennis players, ready to bash the week out of their minds. Lover.
Ursula is washing herself at the bathroom sink, naked except for white knickers and flat black shoes. Her overalls lie on the window sill. The knicker elastic is cutting into her flesh; the hairs on her legs standing with the cold.
—They can see you from here.
—Who?
—The tennis players.
—Big thrill.
She dresses and does herself up. She closes the hall door quietly when she leaves. The clutch grinds as she reverses out the drive. I stand in the hallway surrounded by the tremendous silence of her leaving. A moment later the doorbell rings. A couple of children stand in the porch, red faced and breathless:
—Can we have our ball back, mister?
They step inside to wait. I go out into the back and search for it. Willy and Vomit are fighting on the grass.
—Where is it? Where’s the ball, girls?
The voice that comes out of my mouth is calm. I get the DART into town and go into Scanlon’s. Three morose pints. Two men arguing at the bar. It is. I’m telling you it is. You know what your problem is. I’ll tell you what your problem is. You don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about—that’s your problem. I walk home in the rain, enjoying that pathetic fallacy of it all without an umbrella. The phone is ringing when I get to the front door. She’s probably gone to her mother’s to bitch and that cunt has filled her with superwoman confidence about her life. I pick up the phone and say hello as dourly as possible. It’s Gerry, telling me it’s now or never. Shit or get off the pot he says. I hate that phrase. Ursula doesn’t come home that night and she doesn’t phone. I wake up, feed her cats (already the dividing up—it floods in unbidden) and stare out at the rain dripping off the gutter. Fuck it. Fuck her. Fuck whatever anyone thinks. I walk into town and buy the ticket to New York. I walk back as if in a parade, wanting to be on view to the world with my new resolve. That night I root the television out of its box and plug it in. I sit watching it but I’m only waiting for her to phone. Every hour that passes and she doesn’t phone is an hour more to tell myself I’m right in going. I hate that I need her to push me into a decision but sitting there I know this is the way I am. I leave the television on so the locals think someone is in and go to the pub for a bottle of whiskey. No messages on the machine when I get back. I pour a drink and the phone rings. Isobela saying she’s going tomorrow, looking for a lift to the airport. I tell her my wife has left me and there’s no car. Poor baby, she says, from two women to no women.
I tell her I’ll get a bus out with her. Bus, she says, with disgust. Taxi. I get taxi. Get taxi then, I say. We both laugh and say goodbye. Come visit she says. No, I say. Okay Irish, she says. Be happy. I tell her I’ll write to her from New York.
Two more days pass and no sign from her. If she expects me to phone her she can go to hell. She did the walking out. Come Saturday whether she’s there or not I’m going. The cats can starve. I sleep little on the Friday night, cursing her. I was sure she’d be home by the weekend. The cats wake me meowing at the bedroom door. I feed them, take my suitcases down to the hall and walk around the house one last time. The note is on the kitchen table. It’s going to take some time. I need a break. I’d take the cats but you know they hate being moved. I’ll be in touch. It’s a strange feeling, realising she had been in the house while I was sleeping, in and out like a thief. Need some time. I’ll give you time baby. I call Medbh, and Brefini answers. I ask them to pass on a message to her. After I put the phone down I realise how forced my voice was, controlled and clipped. That it has come to this, a terse message through friends.
New York
New York, New York. Life exploding. Hot dog stands, pretzels, bagels, rocketing subways, yellow cabs, jazz twentyfourseven on the radio, Liza Minnelli advertised the length of a bus, summer thunderstorms, the ricochet of strange languages on street corners. In New York my eyes opened and I realised how insane our life had become. I felt safe there and hated the house in Dublin and hated what had happened to our life. I hated it ending, the years of compromising to make it work coming to nothing.
My first job is painting a gallery in Commerce Street in the Village. I work long hours, not just to make a good impression but to avoid going out. New York intimidates me. There are too many choices. In a foreign city everyone seems to have a purpose. And of course I work to avoid calling her. I dwell on things that I had pushed aside in more generous moments: her visible envy when I was promoted to line leader and then manager. She is incapable of enjoying success, either mine or her own. The Ambitious enjoy nothing, always one step behind the next goal. She is a somewhat successful writer now and her competitiveness baffles and disgusts me. Time magnifies faults.
