“How flattering. When is it?”
“This Saturday. If it's too late notice, then don't worry.”
“No, that's perfect. Nothing planned, for once. And it'll be good for Ludo. He's been even mopier than usual lately. If it's you and Sean, he'll leap at it like a salmon on speed.”
What genius! Now I was going to be stuck with Ludo and Katie for an evening—the couple in the world I most wanted to avoid. After Katie, I invited Milo and Galatea. Milo wanted to bring his new boyfriend and Veronica, which I didn't mind. I called Sean and said he should invite some of his friends. Anything, even that, to dilute Katie and Ludo.
And then, just before I left for home, Ludo called.
“I've just spoken to Katie,” he said. “So we're coming for dinner.”
“Yes, I'm sorry, it wasn't meant to happen. She's got your phone. I didn't know what else to say.”
“It seems a strange thing to pick on.”
“I know. I always thought I was quite good under pressure.”
“I'm not.”
“Well, me neither, it turns out. Not this kind of pressure.”
“What did you phone me for, if it wasn't a dinner invite?” He sounded colder than usual.
“I'm sorry about what I made you do.”
“You didn't make me.”
“Don't be chivalrous. I did. And I wish I hadn't.”
“I wish you wouldn't regret it. It makes me feel worse.”
“I do regret it. I think I went crazy. For a couple of weeks.”
“Are you still crazy?”
“I don't think so. But when you're crazy you can't tell, can you?”
“I've never been crazy. I wish I could be, sometimes.”
“Don't be melodramatic.”
“Don't tell me what to be.”
“Ludo, I called before because I want to say that I used you, and it wasn't fair.”
“I wanted it. What's not fair is this: I love you.”
“You don't, you can't. I don't want love, not from you.”
“So, you just wanted a fuck?”
“Yes, that's what I wanted then. Now what I want is friendship.”
“You're a bitch.”
“I know. That's why I need your friendship.”
“I can't stop thinking about you. I can't be your friend if I'm thinking all the time about what we did. If I'm wanting to do it again.”
“Ludo, you're thirty-something years old. You know as well as I do that these things get better. How long does an obsession last? A week? A month? A year, if you're unlucky. And then it's gone, and you're normal again.”
“I don't want to be normal. And sometimes an obsession lasts forever.”
“I think maybe you are insane.”
“Maybe I am.”
And then, miraculously, he laughed.
“I've missed that sound. The last two times, … you didn't at all.”
“Sex is a serious business.”
I remembered something that Katie had told me ages ago about Ludo: that he was always funny and silly during sex, in a way that could be quite irritating.
“It doesn't have to be. Perhaps it shouldn't be.”
“So if things lightened up a bit, you might—”
Now I laughed. This seemed more like harmless flirting and not the death throes of a spawning animal.
“I might, but I probably wouldn't.”
“Celeste”—his voice was serious again, suffused with … something, longing or desire or perhaps even the love he believed he felt— “whatever you feel, I'm not going to let myself regret this. You're special. You're beautiful. Shit, I'm going to lose it unless I go now.”
And he put the phone down.
I truly thought that we had achieved something. The horror and the dread that surrounded the affair began to diminish. I still felt sick with guilt; I still could not even begin to think about what I'd done, what I'd risked, in relation to Harry. But now there was a chance of fixing things.
I walked along Oxford Street, normally for me an experience akin to having my bikini line waxed. But now, in the late-afternoon crowds, it seemed a beautiful place, so full of life and happiness. I gave a pound to the man who plays the violin outside one of the department stores. Then I went up to the fifth floor, where they sell computers. There was a counter with laptops and personal organizers and digital cameras.
“What's the swankiest gizmo you've got?” I asked the boy behind the counter. His acne reached in irregular archipelagos from his neckline to his forehead. I guessed his mother had bought him his suit. His eyes bulged. The spaces in between the pimples blushed to a similar shade of scarlet. I didn't suppose he got many pretty girls up here asking his advice.
“What kind of gizmo? Do you mean PDA?”
“What's a PDA? Don't tell me. I think I want one of those. Do you gift wrap?”
SEANJOURNALSEVENTEEN.DOC
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A truly astounding thing has happened. I'm pretty sure that Celeste has never bought me anything other than clothes before. Christmas and birthdays, and occasional days between, out come the bags from shops even the names of which excite in me the beginnings of panic. From out of the bags will come neatly wrapped tissue-paper parcels. Inside the parcels lie pants and tops, the occasional jacket; once in a while, a whole suit.
I'm aware that the spirit of the curmudgeon looms large over this, but I can't ever be truly grateful for these Gifts of Names. They smack too much of the businessman buying slinky panties for his mistress, not to further her warmth or comfort but to gratify desires of his own. The desire gratified by Celeste's clothing largesse, I should add hastily, is the entirely human one of not wanting to be embarrassed by your slob of a husband. But the point remains: my birthdays are when she does something for herself.
But this was quite different. I thought it might be cuff links or some other useless oddment: a tiepin, a hip flask, one of the gifts of desperation. It came in a small box. It wasn't heavy, but it was solid.
Oh, heavens.
It was a gadget.
A toy for her boy.
For once, she'd thought about what I might want and then gone out and bought it. And it was so nearly right. How could she know that getting a Pocket PC running a pared-down version of Windows to sync with a Mac was like trying to marry a slob from Leeds to a North London princess, i.e., doable but difficult, painful, expensive. A Palm, or one of the Palm-compatibles from Sony or Handspring, would have been so much easier. I think I hid my disappointment well. At least it was a gadget. It could play MP3 tracks and had a miniversion of Tetris as well as boring stuff—the diary I'd never use, the contacts I didn't have, the appointments nobody wanted to make with me. So I gave her a huge kiss and spent the evening ostentatiously playing with it to show how perfect it was.
Confession time. I've been something close to a geek for about three years now. That's pretty late in life for geekdom to strike. Most of my geek acquaintances have been geeks more or less since birth, struggling from the womb in thick spectacles, when, already lost among humans and comfortable only with machines, their first response was to turn lovingly to the baby heart monitor.
As a teenager, I liked music and girls. They liked squeezing their spots by the green light of their LED screens. They ate their lonely meals in their lonely rooms, playing computer chess.
I never had any interest in computers or technology in general until I got my first Mac, those three long years ago. It was a business decision: there were things that I needed to do with it. It wasn't technology lust or curiosity. I just needed to write some stuff and find things out off the Internet. That's all. Honest. But the thing, the thing that I never expected, was that I understood it. It all made sense. Soon I was drawn into that (not very) secret world of fanatics. I found myself buying computer magazines. Individually at first, hiding them in my Guardian. And then I was buying all three of the available Mac publications: Macworld, MacFormat, and MacUs
er. The newsstand man would greet me with a smile, knowing exactly what I was after, my porn stash of naked plastics, bare VDUs, desktops with their ports wide open, begging me to enter, to insert, to connect. Soon I found that I was a subscriber, enjoying the nearsexual thrill of hearing my beloved mags hitting the mat beneath the letter box. I was there, I was a geek.
That's why, with Celeste asleep beside me, I can write this in bed on my iBook, which is connected to both my iMac and the Internet by a wireless network, called AirPort. It's why I've switched to Mac OS X, although that renders my hard-earned knowledge useless, as I grapple with the industrial-strength UNIX core at its heart and enjoy the liquid beauty of the acclaimed Aqua interface.
I still like girls better than computers. And I don't talk about them unless an obvious “in” presents itself. But I want to. I really want to.
And now I've got a cool new toy to love, to lose. Harry likes it.
“It's my gun.”
“It's not a gun. It's a little computer.”
“Computer gun?”
“No, just a computer.”
“It's a gun.”
“It plays music. Listen.”
Crying now.
“It's a gun it's a gun it's a gun.”
I'm beginning to really regret agreeing to this dinner party of Celeste's. I like dinner parties but not when I'm cooking. The trouble is that my cooking, at its very best, is only just good enough for formal occasions. Quick dinners for the two of us, and I'm laughing. Piles of student food for piles of student friends? I'm your man. But proper dinner-party food, Nigella food, Jamie food, food that people want to talk about rather than just eat—going, “That sauce, so quattrocento,” and “How do you find sea asparagus in the summer?”— well, there I'm pushing the envelope, working at the extreme boundaries of my knowledge and ability. People who eat my food might say “Jesus, I'm stuffed” or “That hits the spot,” but beyond that, I take a lack of projectile vomiting as the ultimate mark of approval. So, you see, come dinner parties, I have no slack to take up: unless I'm on top cooking form, producing personal bests at each round, then disaster looms. And that means stress and no fun—or getting no dinner.
Celeste, of course, won't cook. She'll suggest improbably difficult things and make vague attempts to “help,” but it's like Harry helping poor old Magnus out in the garden. The stress is only partly relieved by the presence, this time, of some of my friends. Leo and Odette; Andrew without Alice; Ludo and Katie. Do they counterbalance the malign Galatea and Milo? Perhaps they do. No word from Uma. She won't come. Will she? Why, in God's name, did I ever mention it to her?
Harry did some new things today. He's developed a mania for jigsaw puzzles. He seems to go more by the shape of the piece than the picture, but he rattles through his twenty-piece floor puzzles in no time at all. Does thinking your two-year-old is especially advanced at jigsaws make you a doting parent? A crazy one?
But his best new trick is making men. He takes collections of rubbish—broken bits of old toys, spools of thread, spoons, stones, coat hangers—and he “makes a man.”
“Make a man,” he says, and then he makes one. He assembles his bits of tat. He assesses. He adjusts. He nods. True, you need to look at his man the way you'd look at a Picasso, maybe even a Kandinsky, before the outline begins to make sense. Yes, there's a sort of head, and there an arm. You wouldn't want to meet one of these men in a dark alley, clanking toward you, grabbing you perhaps, and looking at you with his pencil sharpener eye and his spoon mouth as he hisses “Kill me, please kill me,” like the cocooned victim in the first Alien film, but if asked what it was, you'd say, “Ecce homo.” Well, you'd say that if you'd just read Nietzsche and checked out the notes. Otherwise, you'd say, “Yeah, look, a man.” And God help you if mistake the man for junk and try to tidy him away. Harry hates his men being messed with. He does his mini-samurai, raging until the bits—the head, limbs, torso, pancreas, lymphatic system—are fully restored.
Does this mean that Harry's going to be an artist? Preferably not. Let's hope for a professor of anatomy or a butcher.
I'll try to work the baby Frankenstein stuff into a talk, and thence into my book. The book was a very pleasant surprise. I think the publisher may have thought it was getting some kind of quasi-scientific tract on men bringing up boys, by “Doctor” Sean Lovell. Not that I feel much pity, given the pissant advance it's offered. But at least I have an even better response to the “What do you do?” question—even better, that is, than “I work on the radio” or “web journalist.” Now I can say, “I write books, so fuck off.” It may even be time to resign formally from the Laboratoire Garnier. Perhaps they'll have a leaving do for me. The rabbits'll cry: they always do. I'll tell my fellow hair-and-skin scientists that we really gelled as a team, and they'll hand over my leaving gift, an engraved blackhead squeezer, the tight bastards.
“Whayadoon?” Celeste stirs.
“Just making some notes for my book.”
“S'late.”
“Won't be long.”
“Stop it.”
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“Give me a cuddle.”
“All right, finishing now.”
“Cuddle.”
PRADAPRADAPRADAPRADAGUCCI 18
I suppose it's good to have occasional reminders of why I found Sean so exasperating in the first place. To begin with, he made such a fuss over cooking dinner at my parents’ house that I almost wished I'd done it myself. He decided to make a fish soup of his own devising, flavored with fennel and Pernod, but from the chaos, you'd have thought he'd got the contract for Iran's nuclear bomb production. I swear to God there were nine unwashed pans by the time he'd finished and dismembered bits of sea creature on the floor and the sulphurous stink of unlit gas left on and smears of blood from finger wounds all over the tea towels. We had a blazing row when I tried to help, and I had to get Bella to come and make him behave. He was cooking in nothing but an apron and his underpants, admittedly long and baggy ones (although I thought I'd humanely killed all those), so it was more disgusting than indecent, but it wasn't anyone's idea of an appetizer.
He was still in his apron-and-underpant getup when the first guests arrived. From the front, he looked as though he were actually butt-naked under the apron, but Milo, Galatea, and Veronica took it in their stride, although I did notice a certain hesitancy later on when the soup appeared, with its cockles and scallops providing auditory and visual reminders of what they'd just missed as Sean raced upstairs to change, giving them a flash of his old-man knickers and hairy thighs. All the others—Andrew, Leo, Odette, Katie, Ludo— arrived in a gaggle while he was deciding which T-shirt to put on. They'd caught the same train and arrived in a party mood.
I kissed Ludo. He tried to look in my eyes, but I quickly moved on to Katie, and then the others. Then, drinks in hand, I gave them the tour. They all loved the house. Best of all was the visitation to Harry's room. His arms were thrown above his head, and he had a nozzle from a vacuum cleaner in one hand and a small green dog in the other. The animal was called Greeny the Booger Dog, and he ate … well, you guess. He lived on Venus and was constantly under threat from the evil Emperor Zurg. I supposed that the nozzle was a laser gun and Harry had fallen asleep on guard duty. I'd begged Sean to make his bedtime stories a little less violent, but that was like asking Tarantino to direct a Jane Austen adaptation.
“Funny having three floors and a garden and your own roof,” said Katie. “You get used to everyone living in a apartment.”
“I live in a house,” said Veronica quietly.
“Yes, but not a house like this. Yours is more like a sort of hostel for the homeless.”
“It was good enough for you once, I remember.”
“And will you ever let me forget?”
“Now, now, girls,” said Milo, playing the unaccustomed role of peacemaker. “That's all bile under the bridge. We've kissed and made up a long time ago.”
I'd never quite got to the bottom of the Katie-Ludo-Veronica business. I knew about Katie's famous act of libidinal folly, and the separation, but I had a feeling something had gone on with Veronica. Had Ludo slept with her? Now I knew him better, now I knew that he wasn't quite as saintly as he first appeared, I thought it was more than possible. Despite her plainness—bad skin and coarse hair— she definitely had something. She was always immaculately dressed and presented, but Milo told me that that was a relatively late arrival, and anyway, it was part of the job. Perhaps it was that hardnosed business competence, that total absence of airiness and waffle that I know some men are drawn to. Men who need an exoskeleton.
I'd only met Odette a couple of times, and she worked hard at making a good impression. She'd obviously been brought up properly, because she was full of gushing niceness, however inappropriate, about everything. “What nice curtains,” she'd say, about some hideous bit of fabric, or “I do like how you've arranged your pans.” She reminded me of some of the annoyingly omnicompetent girls at my school, the ones who were good at music and games and still got their Oxbridge exhibitions. I didn't like them then, and I didn't particularly like her now, although I'm prepared to admit that as a fault in me. It wasn't that I thought she was insincere; more that she struck me as being faintly mad. The impression was confirmed when she talked about her “business.” She had, it seemed, abandoned a perfectly good career in the City to make, possibly with her own hands, little versions of Stonehenge for people to put in their gardens. “Gnomehenge” was Andrew's joke—not bad for him.
Leo, her husband, was the sort who always looked as if he were about to say something wonderful or profound but then never really did, unless you shared his interest in the odd bits of philosophy or literature—the bits, as far as I could tell, that people didn't usually bother with. But I noticed that Andrew and Sean looked to him as a kind of oracle and assessed how funny they were being by whether or not he laughed. Both Odette and Leo were unaccountably pleased at having made, though not yet delivered, a baby. I could see that Odette, for all her willowy frame, was going to be huge. You could tell from her big feet.
The Marriage Diaries Page 20
