Boyfriend in a Dress

by Louise Kean

  Vittorio De Sica was an Italian film director who said ‘moral indignation is in most cases two percent moral, forty-eight percent indignation, and fifty percent envy.’ I want to have Charlie’s laidback attitude to fucking about, fucking around, acting like an overgrown boy. I envy his ability not to care more than anything. I just can’t help myself caring, in some small part, about everything. I like to call it passion, a passion that seeps through me and won’t be silenced on so many topics.

  Phil has it too, the ability not to care about the little things, to take life easily, and let the troubles fall away from him as he strolls through his years. I pretend that I am shocked, but in truth I am only angry that I can’t do the same. Phil’s easiness doesn’t seem quite so mindless, or destructive, mostly because I am not having a relationship with him, and his actions can’t hurt me. Charlie’s still do.

  But sexual envy is, of course, not the only kind. We envy other people’s lives, mostly the lives with more money in them, that seem less like hard work. The general populace spends most of its time envying one small band of break-out characters, who are managing to escape the humdrum existence of the rest of us with our money worries and failed relationships. We envy them, and criticize them, and throw abuse in their general direction, and are repelled at their sexual shenanigans, while secretly, and not so secretly, we all want what they’ve got. We all seem to want to be famous. Is it just the money that we want, or the ability to make ourselves look prettier with the cosmetic surgery that they can afford? Being famous seems to me to be a lot of hard work, so it isn’t their schedule that we want – how many of us have to work a twenty-hour day on a regular basis? Our moral outrage when another one of them is arrested for mucking about with fully-grown adults at midnight on Hampstead Heath when there are honestly no kids about is in most parts envy, and that’s what we have to understand. These most beautiful powerful creatures that move about in a world we glimpse but can never touch have a different set of rules to us, rules that apply once you have got past the celebrity gates, and not been blackballed for wanting it too much, or being undeserving. They don’t have to worry about what their boss will think, or their friends. They don’t have to worry about the norms of our society, they are not applicable to them. They move in a world of the most beautiful, desirable creatures on earth, all of whom offer themselves up for the taking. And they dip their fingers in whichever pies suit for the day. A man here, a woman there, they are not the ugly Joes we pass on the street, they look like angels. Given a world where nothing is frowned upon, where you are powerful enough to move from person to person without fear or shame or recrimination, where your sexuality, in private at least, is not an issue, wouldn’t you do the same? If you truly had the ability to sleep with all of these angels, would you turn them down based on the fact that you couldn’t have kids together, or some ancient book says you can’t? I don’t think so.

  Of course as we envy their lives, and their cash and their cars, we never stop to think that they envy us. They envy us our freedom to move from our front door to our car door without having a camera stuck in our face, but in some way their huge amounts of cash are supposed to compensate for this. They lusted for fame and therefore they deserve to have the flashlight of our envy in their faces every minute of their waking lives. I’m not sure, when you actually think long and hard about it, what is more valuable – the cars, or the privacy. I’d like a Ferrari and a holiday home on the Med, but I don’t want my sexual moves to be plastered all over the papers for my mother to read. We can only stop our insane jealousy dressed up as outrage when we decide that we are happy with what we are, that we are where we want to be, and doing all the things we want to do. But who is? Just those famous elusive souls. And maybe they aren’t so happy after all, because whenever they slip up, everybody gets to hear about it.

  Dressed to Kill

  The sun burns down on me as I walk along Charlie’s road, swinging my bag full of vegetables and Martini. Maybe, if the sun goes down, I will talk to him about it. It’s time to end it.

  I turn the key in the door, holding my purse in my mouth, and juggling bags. I shove the door with my shoulder, and kick it closed behind me. But I am stopped in my tracks by the sight in front of me. I drop everything, and the Martini bottle clinks on the floorboards, mercifully not breaking, when I see Charlie sitting on the sofa, staring off into space. As the light from the window catches his face, I can see tear stains on his cheeks, damp red eyes, glazed. I see his hands and feet, twitching slightly, and hear the almost imperceptible noise of teeth chattering, as Charlie shakes, slightly, without control. My mind does immediate grotesque calculations. It can only be drugs. The only time I have ever seen Charlie in this state was after a really bad pill a couple of years ago in Brighton. He had moaned and shook and plummeted from deliriousness to despair in seconds and back again. I don’t remember him crying though, even then. He doesn’t acknowledge my entrance, or the bags crashing to the floor. He doesn’t even realize I am here. A splinter of me entertains an impulse, for whatever reason, to grab the Martini and run back out of the room as quickly as I entered it. But my feet are stuck to the spot. It is one of those few occasions when fatigue instantly takes you, and your body is already aware that the emotional effort needed for the next half an hour at least is going to leave you spent.

  The good me, the moral me, rushes to the surface before the real me grabs the chance to leg it, and I whisper, ‘Charlie, what have you taken?’ This room does not need noise – it might crack something vital and the whole building will collapse. I don’t want to disturb anything that isn’t already quite clearly disturbed.

  I see a flicker in Charlie’s eyes, fear, I think, behind the tears. I don’t know what to think, or do. I feel suddenly helpless, faced with a stranger in a bad way, equipped only with my alcoholic beverage of choice to handle the situation. But it would be rude of me to swig straight from the bottle lying on the floor, and I certainly don’t think I should offer anything to Charlie. I have never seen him actually afraid, but there is no doubt that he is scared. I am too. I can’t move towards him, I have no idea how he will react. My veins feel taut, about to snap.

  ‘Charlie, is it coke? A trip? How much have you done? Should I call a doctor?’ I say, still whispering.

  ‘Charlie? Charlie!’ I raise my voice slightly. ‘Charlie, can you hear me?’

  I take a step towards him, and then stop in my tracks as I see his lips moving, mouthing words neither of us can hear.

  ‘What?’ I ask quietly.

  ‘It’s not … drugs … but … I can’t … move.’

  The tears are flowing now, down his face, and his eyes shift to focus on me, imploring me through the blue and the brown, to do something, to grab him, or hit him, or something. But this is an alien situation for me, I don’t know whether to grab his tongue, or guide his limbs, or bandage splints to the sides of his legs. Or should I just keep him completely stationary? Maybe his neck is broken – you aren’t supposed to move the injured, I remember that from some ancient first aid lesson years ago. I should cover him with a blanket, and call an ambulance. First I need to be sure what he has taken, otherwise I am effectively shopping him to the police.

  ‘Charlie, can you move your toes, can you move at all? Your hands are shaking, I mean, they’re moving. Did you fall? Have you banged your head, or your back, or ..’

  ‘No.’

  Twisting his head down, moving for the first time, he looks at his hands, brings them up to his head, and rests his face in them. He can move – he is not paralysed. I don’t need to call an ambulance or make the splints. I hear him start to sob. Blond strands of hair, mixed with a white powder, hang stiff with sweat round his eyes. I am still standing ten feet away, staring at him, blankly. He is crying slowly, gently. This boy who became a man with me, who does nothing softly these days – not lovemaking, not talking, not breathing – is crying, gently. My impulse is to hold him, but I don’t know how any more – we haven
’t held each other for a long time, like we cared. I take a tentative step forwards, and when he doesn’t react with some kind of animal instinct karate lunge, I step over the bags and move swiftly to the couch, sitting awkwardly on the end. I reach out for one of his hands and he takes it, and for a while we sit quite still. I get a little bored as I realize there is probably nothing wrong with Charlie that is not self- or stupidity-induced, and I feel my lack of patience rise up my throat. I stare out of the window for something to do, as he cries onto my now soggy hand. It is still so hot outside, as the sun makes its way down but seems desperate not to leave. I look directly at it until it hurts my eyes, and I have to close them.

  My mind wanders and I picture myself saying what I was going to say to Charlie tonight as he clutches my hand tightly, and I look back at him. He says something, but I can’t hear.

  ‘What?’ This time I say it with a little less patience. He has ruined my day with his silliness. He’s got pissed at work or something similarly stupid and is now feeling sorry for himself, and I don’t get to say what all of a sudden seems the most important thing in the world to say. After weeks, months of delaying it, I feel I am ready, mostly because there is no possible way I can do it. It’s some false bravado on my part.

  ‘Something’s happened,’ he says gravely. I can see that. I just don’t want to know what it is yet I suppose, what folly has brought this little pantomime on.

  ‘It’s fine. We’ll talk about it later.’ I hear myself, speaking in clichés, but this whole situation dictates them. I don’t know how to react to this other than through somebody else’s words. If they were good enough for somebody else, before me, in a difficult place, and a strange time, they are fine for now. I have nothing to say to him now.

  Here’s what I was going to say.

  ‘Charlie, I think it’s time we stopped seeing each other. I think it’s time we stopped mucking about. Neither of us is getting any younger, and you don’t like me any more, and you’ve changed from the person I liked. It’s not enough. We have nothing in common other than America, history, sex. I don’t think we should be together any more.’

  That is what I had planned to say, later that night if the sun had gone down and left a chill, and I had mustered up the courage, and not been bothered about ruining my sunny day. I had worked it all out in my head. For something that was supposed to mean so little, I had been surprisingly nervous. I had rehearsed it enough to have it almost word-perfect. I’d pictured the various outcomes as well. The first was Charlie completely nonchalant, shrugging his shoulders and brightly asking for one last shag, for the road. The second was Charlie mildly unsettled that I am ending it before him, and getting a bit arsey, telling me he was going to do the same thing but he was too bored to care, which is a possibility, and one that I have convinced myself I could live with. The final version was a devastated Charlie, telling me he has loved me all along, and he doesn’t know what has gone wrong, clutching onto me and begging to give it another try. I don’t know why I even entertain this one, but entertain it I do. Quite a few times actually. I’m not sure if it makes me happy or sad. Whether I want it to happen to give some meaning to the whole mess of the last year, or to prove that I have always meant something to him after all. I could console myself with the fact that I am uncontrollably loveable, and even he who seems now to care so little, and who has slept with half of London in the last six months, can’t bear to be without me. This last version is more a cushion than the truth.

  And you may ask why now and not six months ago when he started being unfaithful on a regular basis? Or even before that, last year, the year before, as we drifted apart and failed to talk about things any more, why not then? What has triggered me to break the routine? And why has Charlie picked today to fall apart? Had he sensed it somehow, and is just putting on this bizarre act to throw me off course, to get me to feel sorry for him and drop my guard so he can spring up, save face, and finish it quick before I can get the words out first. I change my mind – we will talk now. I’ll make sure for certain he’s not falling into a coma or something equally as awful, and then I’ll do it.

  I lean forward and whisper in his ear,

  ‘What have you done? What’s wrong with you? You look … weird.’ I search for a better word.

  ‘You seem ill, Charlie – I’ve never seen you like this.’

  There is no response, he just carries on staring at the floor, almost vacantly, like a victim of something he can’t put into words. He is almost absent, from the room, from himself, the only sign that he is alive now are the tears trickling slowly down the sides of his nose, mingling eventually with the blood sliding from the cut at the side of his eye and meeting in a small puddle, via his sideburn, on my hand. The eye itself, his blue eye, blackens by the second, growing more purple, more bruised, more swollen.

  I try to whisper again, but my voice becomes a little more strained, a little more frustrated with every word.

  ‘Charlie, please, tell me what’s wrong. Have you been in a fight? Has something happened at work? Have you lost a deal? Just tell me if you’re sick or not!’ I raise my voice.

  And still no response, nothing. I feel my temper rising, and I make little effort to control it.

  ‘Charlie, the least you can tell me, the very least, is why the hell you are wearing my dress!’

  What Charlie Has to Say for Himself

  Charlie just sits there, staring at the floor, clutching onto my hand, lean football muscles that regained some of their polish when he started going to his work gym a couple of years ago, now bursting out of a terrible, cheap blue Lycra dress that I bought last summer when I had split my top in a cab on the way to a barbecue. It is an awful dress that didn’t suit me at the time and that I threw off as soon as I got back to Charlie’s that night and have never worn since. Today, stretched over his chest, his thighs, it is apparent he is wearing nothing underneath. The hem skims his hips, but his flaccid third eye is poking out from underneath, resting on the sofa cushion like some whole other person in the room. It’s a distraction, even though I have obviously seen it countless times before. I have held it in my hands, and my mouth, it has been inside me a thousand times, but it doesn’t look right. It looks like a mistake, something I shouldn’t be seeing. Something about it makes me want to recoil. So does Charlie himself. He is certainly not his recent self; a ridiculous, shagging, supremely good-looking drinking monster, aloof, out with the boys, revelling in the shallow, a million miles away from what he used to be, when I fell in love with him. When he fought that side of his character, when he was unhappy with the world for loving him just because he looked good, and had a great smile. Charlie is living, breathing proof that people change, or give up fighting at least.

  ‘Jesus, Charlie, if you won’t tell me, what am I supposed to think? How can I help you?’

  We are still holding hands and he starts to cry again, as I gaze out at the city, and the evening heat, and the smog mixing with the last rays of the day, landscaping East London. Charlie squeezes my hand tighter, and carries on resting his wet face against it. I make a decision. It’s just a hunch, but I don’t think now is the time to break up with him.

  After about half an hour, I realize I have been watching the world get dark out of the window, and that Charlie has stopped crying. Uncomfortably, I feel my hand in his, and we both sense the tension simultaneously. Suddenly my hand is stiff and unyielding. We never hold hands any more. We have dinner sometimes, I cook, we read the papers, we pretend we don’t know what is going on in the other’s head. But still he holds onto me. The blood has dried on his face, and he reaches up and scrapes it away. He catches my eye, and I smile at him nervously. I’m not sure what to do, but he speaks for us both. I don’t turn the lamp on; I just listen.

  ‘I want to tell you, I need to tell you, what happened.’

  ‘Fine, Charlie, tell me. I’m listening.’

  ‘You don’t understand, it’s important that you be the person to hear
this – I need to know you understand, and that you can forgive me. More than anyone.’ He has gone from silence to a strange eloquence in one easy step. I am a little anxious, but he can’t be telling me anything I don’t already know. Unless he is gay – I have never entertained that. I shock myself with the thought, purely because this is Charlie, and he has always been so … straight. He doesn’t have the personality to be gay. Maybe he is just a transvestite. I think I would find it weird, hard to understand, but not unacceptable in the slightest. Whatever floats your boat these days.

  ‘Charlie, tell me, it can’t be that bad.’

  ‘You don’t understand, it is big!’ He widens his eyes, as if whatever he is going to tell me is going to blow me away.

  ‘Charlie, for God’s sake – just tell me! I just want to know now!’

  ‘Ok, last night … I slept with someone else last night.’

  Is that it? That barely even raises my interest – I could have told him that the odds are on it these days. He must be getting his sex from somewhere, his sex drive is ridiculous, and he sure as hell hasn’t had any from me recently.

  ‘And?’ I ask him, raising an eyebrow, and shaking off his hand. I don’t particularly want to hear the gory details, no matter how unsurprising I find it.

  ‘And I was out in town with the boys, at a bar. We’d been drinking all day, and I saw this girl, she was blonde.’ I hear my jaw click. He has mentioned the ‘B’ word. He looks at me, uncertain as to whether to carry on, but I don’t think a freight train could actually stop him now. He wants to confess.

  ‘I fed her some drinks. She came back here. She left about three a.m. I didn’t want her to stay.’

  He looks me straight in the eye.

  ‘I never want them to stay.’ If I look even remotely shocked it is only because it’s the first time he himself has told me. I’ve heard it from everybody but Charlie.