by Carol Mason
We had split up before. I can’t even remember why now: something petty and pointless, no doubt. Mike made a transparently unconvincing production of moving out with a tie hanging out of his suitcase, and putting himself up on the couch of a mate from work for five nights. By the Friday he was home, because a) his back was acting up, b) he realised he wasn’t the one who was unhappy: I was, so if anybody should leave, it should be me, and c) we’d planned to go camping in Scotland that weekend and he’d been looking forward to it for ages. But this time when he left, he’d already rented another house. He didn’t want us making up our minds and changing them again because we were too afraid of life without the anchor of each other, too afraid of the ‘over’ in case it was worse than staying together. But somehow, through all the business of him going, I still imagined him coming back.
My phone rings, shocking me for a second, and my first thought is that maybe it’s him. The kitchen table that doubles as my work desk is covered in papers, magazines, client files, questionnaires, surveys, research findings, my empty cereal bowl, old coffee cups, a chocolate wrapper from a Mars Bar. I find the phone just before it stops ringing. A name on my call display. But it’s not his name.
The rain rushes at the window again. I’m cold even though the fire’s on in the living room and it heats the entire main floor of our small, detached, two-storey stone cottage. My gaze goes to the photo of Mike and me on the shelf above the kitchen table. It was taken five years ago at a wedding: my first client’s. Mike’s hair, ever the same Fonz style. His straight, almost too perfect teeth, and kind, shyly sexy smile. I am head and shoulders taller than him even minus the hat. But it’s still a good picture of us. Since he left I’ve not once thought of taking it down.
I’ve noticed something lately though. No matter where I stand, those eyes are watching me. Like they’re doing now. They’ve got this uncanny ability to change when the mood demands it. Sometimes they’re smiling, if Aimee and I are locking horns like we do so often. But other times, like now, they are full of pent-up sadness, as though he is choked with words he cannot say, and recognising the frustrating limitations of the fact that he’s just a face in a photograph.
My phone rings again. Someone is persistent. I answer with a flat “Hello,” still unable to drag my eyes from Mike’s. All I see is the un-tidying and untying of two lives, and the barrel of neutrality and pointlessness that I’m now staring down, at my future. It takes me a moment or two to realise that it’s Kim, one of my clients. I run a company called The Love Market, a professional matchmaking service to upper income executives across the North of England. I met Kim three months ago in her Newcastle Quayside office. She runs one of the largest public relations agencies in the country. The friendly smile and instant enquiry about where I’d bought my leopard-print boots made us bond instantly, in a way that only women can do over something as trivial as fashion. The broken capillaries at the base of her nose, that somehow mar her pretty, otherwise-flawless face, with its bottomless blue eyes. The faint neurosis when she suddenly cut me off mid-sentence, picked up the phone and demanded her secretary come in to dust her desk. ‘Allergies,’ she told me. So that explained the nose. But perhaps not the Devil Wears Prada attitude.
Kim has been on three dates with David Hall, a widowed property developer who responded to my advertisement on the bulletin board of an exclusive golf and country club. I had hoped that three dates was a sign that everything was going quite well. ‘I was hoping you might have a minute. Celine,’ she says. ‘Something really awful has just happened to me.’
Kim’s dramatic personality type likes to leave you with a cliff-hanger. This has a way of ensuring that I can’t say, no, Kim, I do not have a minute, particularly as something terrible has happened to you.
In Kim’s case, I’m not too worried about how awful her awful is. After all, this is the person who refused to go on a date with a man because his last name was Schmink. A renowned heart surgeon would have been The One, if he’d only had shoulders and, wasn’t “just a pair of arms pinned on either side of his throat.” And then there was handsome, easygoing Frank. What was his crime? Didn’t he just order dessert for himself when she told him she didn’t want any?
‘What happened, Kim?’ I tell myself I have to sound more concerned. Knowing my luck, this could indeed be the one time I’ve love-matched a client with Jeffrey Dahmer II, or someone who keeps albums of teenage girls in his night-table drawer. But the main reason is that Kim has paid me two thousand pounds to match her with ten to twelve men over the course of a year. I take this responsibility seriously and wouldn’t want any of my clients at The Love Market thinking I don’t have their best interests at heart.
‘Celine, I’m just so shocked and disgusted. It was horrible!’
I am guessing it’s a peculiar sexual preference thing, or an odd-looking private part. One thing I have discovered in this business: women will always clinically dissect their sexual encounters with their dates. Whereas my male clients never talk about their dates disrobed, and I’ve never yet heard a man say that the sex wasn’t good enough. I pinch the bridge of my nose and try not to sound like moments ago I was crying. ‘Why don’t you tell me all about it right from the beginning, Kim?’ I say.
She launches into how the salmon was overcooked at dinner, then about a film. ‘We couldn’t agree on which one to see, so we ended up going to see one that neither of us wanted to see, just to make it fair, which, of course was a complete and utter disaster, because if there’s one thing I can’t stand it’s anything to do with aliens…’ Now I get fifteen minutes on the plot of the film that neither of them wanted to go and see.
As she chatters on, I stare out at the garden again. It looks so barren in the rain. The empty planter boxes. The vegetable patch that probably won’t get tended to now that Mike’s gone. It strikes me properly now, and perhaps for the first time, that I’ll never again wake up beside him, never attend a single one of his tedious office Christmas parties, try to match another pair of his socks, follow him into the toilet, argue over visiting his mother, grumble about the predictability of our lives, or why I don’t think we’re happy. Never is such a final word. The rain slides down the window like tears. I realise I’ve let my hand with the phone in it drop. Kim’s voice is rattling on from its new place by my knee. When I bring it back to my ear, she’s still going on about aliens. ‘Kim,’ I interrupt her. ‘I thought you were telling me about David.’
‘I’m getting there!’ she growls. ‘I’m just trying to set the scene. But as you’re obviously in some sort of hurry… if you must know, we went back to his very nice Newcastle loft, and we were on his very nice couch, and one thing was leading to another. I had tugged down his jeans…’ She sighs a trembling sigh, like a person severely traumatized. ‘Oh, it was awful!’
The Apollo rocket will come back from the moon before she finally spits it out. ‘What was?’
‘It was just…. it was just there. His raw, exposed… ’ She searches for the word then says a dramatic, ‘Willie!’ She tuts. ‘Celine, the man doesn’t wear underpants.’
‘Oh!’ I say, momentarily taken aback.
‘Oh?’ She sounds stern. ‘Is that it?’
‘Well, have you thought that maybe he was just behind on his washing?’
‘But they weren’t in the washing. And I checked his drawers. None their either. I can assure you his entire flat is an underpant-free zone.’
‘So, hang on a second. You were in his bedroom? Does this mean you slept with him?’
‘Does it sound like I was attracted to him, after that?’ Her tone has imbecile written all over it. ‘I had a quick mooch when he got up from the couch to go to the toilet. To clean himself—who knows what they have to do.’
I try to force away the rather distasteful picture of David doing unsavoury things in the bathroom, and of Kim ferreting in his dirty laundry. While I’m always intrigued by what makes people tick, and the blend of part-science part-instinct that goe
s with matching two human beings—a bit like pairing wine with food—I never bargained for how this job would take over my life. I am called upon, whenever my clients need me, to be a psychologist, babysitter, best friend, life coach, stylist, punching bag, hatchet man, walking dictionary of everything... I’m always contemplating ways to charge them a retainer for the hours I generally spend just listening to them talk, which they seem to think comes free with the service, but I’ve never quite worked out how to do that. I’ve got to get onto it. I could be rich.
‘He’s a freeballer,’ I tell her. ‘They’re not as rare a breed as you might think. Freeballers feel cleaner and healthier without underwear. Often it’s because they’ve had air flow problems in the past, so their doctors have encouraged them to give this a try. Freeballers aren’t a known sociopathic group, so we’re really quite safe with him. And—I know you’ll disagree—but you actually can’t make a judgment about anyone by their underwear status. And wearing underwear does not guarantee that you are a cleaner person. Just ask any woman who has ever done an old man’s laundry.’
Molly, Mike’s old black and tan tabby cat, comes into the kitchen to eat her food, and rubs up against my bare leg. I reach down and stroke her warm and bony body.
‘I’m sorry, are you saying that I shouldn’t find it disgusting, Celine?’ She sounds hurt, and a little angry, as though I have crossed enemy lines. ‘I mean, wouldn’t you? He wears his jeans, even his Armani suit, next to his bare bottom. How often do you think he washes his jeans, or gets his suit dry-cleaned?’ Her tone implies I obviously have suspicious hygiene habits myself.
I look at Mike’s picture again. His eyes seem to be smiling. He’d get such a kick out of this, if I told him. Then it strikes me how he’s not going to come home ever again and kiss me, and ask me how my day was. I’m not going to sit over dinner telling him about Kim and the underpants, and Aimee and the latest school drama, and vent all my small frustrations. And somewhere inside me it feels like a colossal tragedy that our marriage has come to this. All those assumptions we had that because we were together, we would stay together. As though the two were somehow interknit.
‘I’m just not sure it constitutes a serious problem, that’s all,’ I tell Kim, hauling myself back from where my mind just wants to go: thinking about us and why we went wrong. ‘I mean, not if everything else is good about him. Remember the Seven Deadly Sins? David Hall doesn’t commit a single one of them. He’s not chronically late, or rude to waiters. He’s got no scary divorce stories, or satanic kids, he doesn’t have anger issues, isn’t unduly attached to his parents, and he didn’t suggest splitting the bill on your first date. I’d say we shouldn’t write him off just yet.’
‘I don’t know…’
‘You should try to remember what’s out there. You know that David is one of the few men who can handle a successful, independent woman, and he isn’t looking for someone thirty years younger.’ A subtle reminder to her that, at forty-five, Kim is not likely to attract a man her age. I don’t need a study to prove that heavy objects fall at the same speed as light ones, nor do I need one to tell me that most men in their late fifties want to try out their inner Ronnie Wood when it comes to finding new love again, and that doesn’t bode well for women like Kim, or me, who don’t need an older man for his money, and prefer the standard age difference of 2.2 years. It pains me to think she might be giving up on him this fast.
My words ring a note of panic in me about my own future now. Who is now out there for me? Am I so played-out and jaundiced now that I can’t energize myself to go down the path of getting to know and love another man? Am I going to be that “once burned, twice shy” person—the very type I’ve counselled when they have wanted to join The Love Market? I’m not even sure I know what ingredients are supposed to go into this recipe for the perfect feelings you should feel for someone before you marry them. Before someone will accuse you of going into it for the wrong reasons.
I remember Mike’s words in one of our last fights: “if all I am is a safety blanket for you then this is really just a marriage of convenience, isn’t it.”
‘Can’t you just give him another chance?’ I plead, on David Hall’s behalf. The photo is watching me again, like it knows a few things about second chances. “Shall we give it another try?” I can hear Mike saying, after every time we’d fought and talked about whether we should break up: sending up these trial balloons. Testing the waters of each other, to see if the other one was reaching the limits of their tolerance. I can’t look at him, and yet I can’t stop looking at him. I get up and turn the frame face down, thinking, okay, now all I have to do is erase his face from my head.
‘I don’t know,’ Kim says. ‘Honestly, I’m not sure I can be attracted to him after this.’
‘Look,’ I tell her, brightly. ‘Why don’t you tactfully present him with a pair of underpants, and tell him you’d find him really sexy if he put them on?’
‘Or, I have a better idea,’ she says. ‘You could have a talk with him. Tell him Kim says the underpants are going to be the deal breaker.’
I picture Kim as the Mafia Don, and me, her “made guy”.
‘After all, I do pay you,’ she says.
With types like Kim, retaliation to irksome comments is no-win. You have to appeal to the higher power that controls them: their ego. Sweet talk them round to your way. ‘I’m well aware you pay me, Kim. And you know I’ll do anything to help. But in this case, given it’s about his nether regions, I just think it’s going to be better coming from you. I’m sure if you gently tell him how this is putting you off, he’ll have those boxers on in a flash.’
‘Do you think?’
‘I don’t just think. I know.’ I tell her.
‘Let me give it some thought,’ she says, sounding miffed that she didn’t succeed in getting me to do her dirty work.
When we hang up, it strikes me what a change I’ve undergone. How conceited I used to be about being a married woman with a child. I was lucky enough to have been lured into this false sense of security that you have when you are attached legally, and in other ways, to another human being. Where you can say and do virtually anything to them, and they will tolerate you and try to understand you, and put it down to you just being you—for some greater goal that even they don’t clearly understand. It somehow put me above the petty criticisms that the single confer upon their dates. I had deeper, more justifiably petty things to find fault with. Back then, that seemed to signal that my life was in good shape.
I look at Mike’s picture again.
It was clearly a very warped way of measuring success.
Two
My seventy-five year-old father is teaching my twelve-year-old daughter to draw—art being the only subject she seems to do okay in these days. Aimee has reached that age where she no longer believes what her report cards used to say to encourage her when her marks were lagging behind those of her friends: “Aimee has not yet reached her full potential.” If trying hard were everything, Aimee would be a genius. Yet the best she ever hits are Bs. Gymnastics is the only thing she has consistently excelled at. Back in the autumn, though, a month after her dad moved out, Aimee fell off her bike. She was dodging a deer that had stalked out from behind trees along a country road. She broke her right arm and her leg in two places, and had to miss six weeks of school. For Aimee, the bigger catastrophe was that she missed out on competing in the under 16s regional gymnastics championship that she’d trained so hard for.
I go over to the settee to where she’s sitting, and drop a kiss on the top of her silky brown hair with its one tiny plastic clutch clip keeping back the fringe that she’s trying to grow out. ‘Hi sweets.’
‘Hi, Mum,’ she says, flatly, and waggles her fingers in a wave, too absorbed by her ‘Girls Aloud’ DVD to look up.
I go back into the kitchen. My dad is seated at my messy work table. I do a double-take on his face, as it seems frozen into a strangely guilt-ridden and electrified smile. M
y eyes go to the 8”x10” manila envelope over which he has, quite possessively, laid both his hands. I go to pick it up, and he clings on, until we are playing tug of war. ‘What’s this?’ I say, when I manage to get it off him and take out the photograph that’s inside.
‘Sandra Mansell, thirty-six, from Jesmond. Do you think she’d be interested in modelling for me? She has very good bones.’
I look at the photo of my buxom spa-owner client, and now, back at my father’s bright red face that has broken a small sweat. ‘I’m sure Sandra wouldn’t want a man of your tender years getting his jollies from her picture,’ I scold him, playfully tut-tutting and I take it away from him. I put it back in the envelope.
‘How do you know?’ he chuckles. ‘She just might.’ Then he salutes the envelope and says, ‘Ah… So long Sandra. You’re a real man magnet. It was wild while it lasted.’
I try not to let him see the smile that breaks out on my face, and I go and hang up my drenched coat behind the back door. ‘Do you want to stay for dinner, Dad?’ I set about emptying shopping bags onto my countertop. But he’s still off in space with a shifty smile on his face, thinking about Sandra.
Being the daughter of a diminutive, dirty old man has been the cross I’ve borne to lesser and greater degrees nearly all of my life. When I was Aimee’s age, my father left my mother and me for a young woman. Not because he no longer loved us, but because he loved this Marie more. He tried to explain to me that if my mother hadn’t loved him so much, he might have loved this Marie less. And even though he loved me more than he loved any of them, he still had to leave us for her.
I was already confused. All I knew was the bottom line: I had lost my dad. And because my mother was so stung by life, in a way I had lost her too. Even more confusing was that my mother never looked like she loved my dad too much, not by the way he would do something that would harden her against him for weeks. And even when she’d forgiven him it was still there: the hesitant return to trust; the anticipation of another transgression later.
