Man and Wife

by Tony Parsons

  I reached for the door bell.

  I just had to get this straight about Sunday.

  And that’s when I felt the cop’s hand on my shoulder.

  Once I was the man of her dreams.

  Not just the man who looked after her kid on Sundays. The man of her dreams, back in the years when all Gina’s dreams were of family.

  Gina yearned for family life, ached for it, in the way that is unique to those who come from what were once called broken homes.

  Her father had walked out just before Gina started school. He was a musician, a pretty good guitarist, who would never quite make it. Failure was waiting for him, in both the music business and the smashed families that he left in his wake. Glenn – he was Glenn to everyone and dad to no one, especially not his children – gave rock and roll the best years of his life. He gave the women and children he left behind nothing but heartache and sporadic maintenance payments.

  Gina and her mother, who had given up a modestly successful modelling career for her spectacularly unsuccessful husband, were just the first of many. There would be more abandoned families like them – women who had been celebrated beauties in the sixties and seventies, and the children who were left bewildered by separation before they could ride a bike.

  From her mother Gina got her looks, a perfect symmetry of features that she was always dismissive of, the way only the truly beautiful can be. From Glenn her inheritance was a hunger for a stable family life. A family of her own that nobody could ever take away. She thought she would find it with me because that was exactly where I came from. She thought I was some kind of expert on the traditional set-up of father, mother and child living in a suburban home, untouched by divorce statistics, unshakably nuclear. Until I met Gina, I always thought that my family was embarrassingly ordinary. Gina made us feel exotic – and that was true of my mum and dad, as well as me. This smiling blonde vision came into our world and up our garden path and into our living room, telling us we were special. Us.

  Our friends all thought that Gina and I were too young for marriage. Gina was a student of Japanese, looking for a way to live her life in Tokyo or Yokohama or Osaka. I was a radio producer, looking for a way into television. And our friends all reckoned it was much too soon for wedding vows and a baby, monogamy and a mortgage. Ten years too soon.

  They – the language students who thought the world was waiting for them, and the slightly older cynics at my radio station who thought they had seen it all before – believed that there were planes to catch, lovers to meet, drugs to be taken, music to be heard, adventures to be had, foreign flats to be rented, beaches to be danced on at dawn. And they were right. All of those things were waiting. For them. But we gave them up for each other. Then our son came along. And he was the best thing of all.

  Pat was a good, sweet-natured baby, smiling for most of the day and sleeping for most of the night, as beautiful as his mother, ridiculously easy to love. But our life – already married, already parents, and still with a large chunk of our twenties to go – wasn’t perfect. Far from it.

  It wasn’t just a job. Gina had given up a whole other life in Japan for her boys, and sometimes – when the money was tight, when I came home from work too tired to talk, when Pat’s brand-new teeth were painfully pushing through his shining pink gums and he could no longer sleep all night – she must have wondered what she was missing. But we had no real regrets. For years it was fine. For years it was what we had been waiting for. Both of us.

  A family to replace the one that I had grown up with.

  And a family to replace the one that my wife had never known.

  Then I spent one night with a colleague from work. One of those pale Irish beauties who seemed a little bit smarter, and a little bit softer, than most of the women I worked with.

  And it was madness. Just madness.

  Because after Gina found out, we all had to start again.

  I sent money every month.

  The money was never late. I wanted to send it. I wanted to help bring up my son in any way I could. That was only right and proper. But sometimes I wondered about the money. Was it all being spent on Pat? Really? Every penny? How could I know that none of it was being blown on the guy my ex-wife married? Bloody Richard.

  I didn’t know. I couldn’t know.

  And even that was okay, but I felt like the money should give me certain basic human rights. Such as, I should be able to call my son whenever I needed to talk to him. It shouldn’t be a problem. It should be normal. And how I missed normal. A few days of normality, full board – what a welcome mini-break that would be.

  But when I picked up the phone I always found I couldn’t dial the number. What if Richard – strange the way I called him by his first name, as if we were actually friends – answered? What then? Small talk? Small talk seemed inadequate for our situation. So words failed me, I replaced the receiver, and I didn’t make the call. I stuck to the schedule worked out in advance with Gina, and my only child and I might as well have been on different planets.

  But I still felt like the monthly money – which my current wife, I mean my second wife, I mean my wife thought was a tad too generous, by the way, what with us wanting to move to a bigger place in a better area – should mean something.

  It wasn’t as though I was some wayward bastard who didn’t want to know, who had already moved on to his new family, who was quite keen to forget all that went before. I was not like one of those scumbags. I was not like Gina’s old man. But what can you do?

  I’m only his father.

  My wife understood me.

  My wife. That’s how I thought of her. Second wife always sounded plain awful. Like second home – something you get away to at the weekend and during the longer school holidays. Or second car – as if she was a rusty VW Beetle.

  Second wife sounded like second-hand, second choice, second best – and Cyd deserved far better than all of that. All that second business wasn’t good enough for Cyd, didn’t describe her at all. And new wife – that was no good either.

  Too much like trophy wife, too much like so-many-years-my-junior wife, too many images of dirty old men running off with their secretaries.

  No – my wife. That’s her. That’s my Cyd.

  Like Cyd Charisse. The dancer. The girl in Singin’ in the Rain who danced with Gene Kelly and never said a word. Because she didn’t have to. She had those legs, that face, that flame of pure fire. Gene Kelly looked at Cyd Charisse, and words were not necessary. I knew the feeling.

  Cyd understood me. She would even understand about Sunday afternoon in Paris.

  Cyd was my wife. That was it. That was all. And this life I was returning to now, it was not new, and it was second to nothing.

  This was my marriage.

  Before I went into our bedroom I checked on Peggy.

  She was out for the count but she had kicked off her duvet and was clutching a nine-inch moulded-plastic doll to her brushed-cotton pyjamas. Peggy was a pale-faced, pretty child with an air of solemnity about her, even when she was what my mum would call soundo, meaning fast asleep.

  The doll in her tiny fist was a strange-looking creature, cocoa-coloured but with long blonde hair and blue, blue eyes. Lucy Doll. Marketing slogan – I Love Lucy Doll. Made in Japan but aimed at the global market place. I was becoming an expert on this stuff.

  There was nothing WASPy about Lucy Doll, nothing remotely Barbie about her. She looked a little like the blonde one in Destiny’s Child, or one of those new kind of singers, Anastacia and Alicia Keys and a few more I can’t name, who are so racially indeterminate that they look like they could come from anywhere in the world. Lucy Doll. She had fully poseable arms and legs. Peggy was crazy about her. I covered them both up with an official Lucy Doll duvet.

  Peggy was Cyd’s child from her previous marriage to a handsome waste of space called Jim. This good-looking loser who did one right thing in his life when he helped to make little Peggy. Jim with his weakness for Asian
girls. Jim with his weakness for big motorbikes that he kept crashing. He came round to our house now and then to see his daughter, although he was not on a fixed schedule like me with Pat. Peggy’s dad turned up more or less when he felt like it.

  And his daughter was crazy about him.

  The bastard.

  I had met Peggy before I met Cyd. Back then Peggy was just the little girl who looked after my son, in those awful months when he was still fragile and frightened after I had split up with his mother. Peggy looked after Pat in his early days at school, spent so much time with him that they sometimes seemed like brother and sister. That bond was fading now that their lives were increasingly separate, now that Pat had Bernie Cooper and Peggy had a best friend of her own sex who also loved Lucy Doll, but Peggy still felt like more than my stepdaughter. It felt like I had watched her grow up.

  I left Peggy clutching Lucy Doll and went quietly into our bedroom. Cyd was sleeping on her half of the bed, the sleep of a married woman.

  As I got undressed she stirred, came half-awake and sleepily listened to my story about Pat and Paris and broken trains. She took my hands in hers and nodded encouragement. She got it immediately.

  ‘You poor guys. You and Pat will be fine. I promise you, okay? Gina will calm down. She’ll see you didn’t mean it. So how’s the weather in Paris?’

  ‘It was sort of cloudy. And Gina says she has to think about next Sunday.’

  ‘Give her a few days. She’s got a right to be mad. But you’ve got a right to take your boy to Paris. Jump in bed. Come on.’

  I slipped between the sheets, feeling an enormous surge of gratitude. What Gina saw as an unthinking, reckless act of neglect Cyd saw as a good idea that went badly wrong. An act of love that missed the train home. She was biased, of course. But I said a prayer of thanks that I was married to this woman.

  And I knew it wasn’t the wedding band that made her my wife, or the certificate they gave us in that sacred place, or even the promises we had made. It was the fact that she was on my side, that her love and support were there for me, and would always be there.

  I talked on in the darkness, feeling the warmth of my wife next to me, trying to reassure myself that this mess could be fixed.

  I would call Gina in the morning, I said. I had to get it straight about next Sunday and if I should pick Pat up at the usual time. And I had to apologise for worrying her sick. I hadn’t meant to cause all this trouble. We only went to Paris because I didn’t want Pat to be like the other kids with their part-time dads. The half-French girl who had turned vegetarian, and the countless millions like her. I wanted Pat to feel he had a real father, who did special things with him, adventures that he would remember forever. Like my dad did with me.

  My wife kissed me to cheer me up, and no doubt to shut me up, and then she kissed me some more.

  It soon became a different kind of kissing. It became the kind of kissing that has nothing to do with soothing and cuddles and reassurance. The kind of kissing that had started everything. I’ll say this for our marriage – it hadn’t changed the quality of the kissing.

  Then she was waiting for me, her black hair fanning out across the pillow, her face lit only by the glow of a streetlamp coming through the slats of the blinds. This woman I was still mad about. My wife.

  I moved towards her without reaching for the little wooden box in the bedside drawer that contained our family planning.

  Then I heard her sigh in the darkness.

  ‘Don’t make me go through this every time, Harry. Please, darling. Come on. You already have a kid. Didn’t we agree on all that?’

  I had been reading a lot about baby hunger recently. It was regularly featured in the ‘You and Yours’ pages of our Sunday paper. Women desperate to give birth. It was supposed to be all the rage. But my wife didn’t have baby hunger. She acted like she had already eaten.

  We had discussed having a child of our own, of course. I wanted it now, because it would make us a family. Cyd wanted it one day, because there were other things she had to do first. Work things. Business things. We both had a vision of a happy life. But no matter how much I loved my wife’s adorable bum, I couldn’t kid myself that they were the same vision.

  So I reached for the little box of condoms, wondering what she meant about already having a kid. Did she mean Pat? Or Peggy? Or whichever one I happened to be with at the time?

  That was the trouble with being a guy like me. It got complicated. All these parts of your life that never seemed to fit together. Sometimes you couldn’t even recognise your own family.

  But after we made love I slept facing the same way as my wife, our bodies tucked tight together, my right arm lightly curled around her waist.

  And for all those sweet hours that we slept like that, making spoons and dreaming, she was the only one for me, and it wasn’t complicated at all.

  three

  ‘You can’t make an omelette by keeping your dick in your trousers,’ Marty Mann told me. ‘That’s the trouble with you, Harry. You’re a born romantic. You’re going to get your foolish heart broken. You’re going to get butt-fucked by fate. What other way can it end?’

  We were sitting in his well-appointed office at Mad Mann Productions, talking about work. Only work. But Marty was one of those go-getting, self-made businessmen who always made work sound like something else. Like the rougher end of jailhouse sex, in fact.

  Marty was always promising male, middle-aged commissioning editors that he would ‘make you my bitch’. He didn’t get merely excited about the TV programmes he produced, he ‘got a boner’. He was never let down in a business deal, he was ‘humped and dumped’. He didn’t just work hard, he ‘fucked like a rattlesnake’.

  It made me wonder what his married life was like. After a couple of drinks on a Saturday night, I could imagine him asking his wife if she would consider a co-production deal.

  I had known Marty a very long time. Siobhan, his wife of about two years, had once been my kind of girlfriend, of about two hours. Just before my first marriage broke up.

  Marty and I had started out together, on late-night talk radio, working the nut shift. I produced, and Marty made sad, lonely people sound wildly entertaining. Then we went into TV together and I thought that our partnership was my meal ticket for life. Right up until the lunch where he sacked me.

  We eventually made it up. Because I bounced back with a younger, hotter talk-show host, while Marty lost his bounce altogether. When he had been suitably humbled by the grim realities of zero-rated daytime television, trying to sell jewellery that would make your skin turn green, we found that we could be friends again.

  These days we were on the same side of the camera. Mad Mann Productions no longer produced shows featuring the dyed-blonde shock jock who caused so much controversy back in the nineties. Now Marty was a programme maker. He was always on my case because my production company made just one show, Fish on Friday. You might have seen it. The one with Eamon Fish, that young Irish comic? Eamon was famous for dating weather girls. It was said he knew more about warm fronts than any man in the country. Marty would never put his faith in one young stand-up comic pretending to be a talk-show host. Marty had a whole raft of programmes.

  ‘Six Pissed Students in a Flat,’ he said, hitting a button on the remote. One wall of his office was covered with TV screens and every one of them switched to his latest concept. Beautiful young people in minimal clothing raising their voices in rented accommodation. ‘It’s got the lot – sex, youth, drama, low overheads, pierced nipples. Six Pissed Students in a Flat, Harry. The advertisers are weeping with gratitude.’

  He hit another button. The screens switched to a weird-angle black-and-white shot of two young men struggling with the owner of a convenience store. ‘Ah, this bit is great,’ Marty chuckled as the man behind the counter produced a baseball bat and began wildly lashing out. One of the young men pulled out a gun.

  ‘You’ve Been Robbed!’ Marty said. ‘Hilarious – and som
etimes tragic – real-life footage of violent robbery. A, er, savage indictment of, you know, our violent society.’ Another button. Footage of Vietnam villages exploding into orange flames, hippies fornicating in the mud at Woodstock, students confronting the National Guard, all given a coating of melancholy by the Kinks singing ‘Waterloo Sunset’. ‘All Your Yesteryears. Making the past funky. One for the baby boomers – and their children. Show the spoilt little bastards what they missed.’

  Our production companies couldn’t have been more different. I worked out of a back room in Soho with a couple of part-timers, Marty had a big office full of staff. I had Eamon Fish on the midnight shift, Marty had Six Pissed Students in a Flat on prime time.

  ‘You can’t have just one show,’ Marty insisted. ‘It’s no good having all of your eggs in one chicken. And Eamon’s not going to be hot forever.’

  ‘But I like working with just one production. That means I can really focus on Eamon. Get the most out of him.’

  ‘What if it all goes wrong? What happens then? You know what TV programmes are like, don’t you?’

  ‘Women?’

  He slapped his desk. ‘Exactly. TV programmes are just like women. You’ve got to have your chicken in a number of pies. Diversify, dude. You’ve got to spread your seed.’

  Marty had a wife at home who was expecting their second child. Siobhan was a former programme maker who had made the switch to homemaker. She was a smart, beautiful Irish redhead who I sometimes saw at launch parties and screenings but I had no idea if she was happy or not. I couldn’t help noticing that Mad Mann contained a greater proportion of attractive young women than you would expect in a production company of this size.

  But I listened to Marty. He knew his stuff. And I listened to him because work was increasingly important to me. Not just because I was self-employed now. Not just because the number of bills I had to pay seemed to be growing every year. The real reason I worked so hard was because I was good at it. This was what I did best.